Wall Street Journal (paywalled) The digital payments company plans to build an ad sales business around the reams of data it generates from tracking the purchases as well as the broader spending behaviors of millions of consumers who use its services, which include the more socially-enabled Venmo app.
PayPal has hired Mark Grether, who formerly led Uber’s advertising business, to lead the effort as senior vice president and general manager of its newly-created PayPal Ads division.
Just put the card in directly on random websites.
I’m not joking - if you follow your existing “should I even be using this site anyway?” signs, it’s going to typically be fine to use your debit card there.
And when something does go wrong, you’ll get better support from your credit union will give you better fraud correction support than PayPal would. (You don’t still use a bank like a sucker, right…?!)
The worst case, usually, is they issue a new card to prevent further fraud.
So I guess it’s a few things:
Many years ago, PayPal’s innovation was treating people who shop online like actual people. The rest of the world has caught up, while PayPal lost sight of that.
Source: I worked in FinTech. It’s amazing how bad your current options are, but it tends to work out, anyway. There’s an extremely ethical and detail-oriented army of women named Karen, behind the scenes, looking out for you.
Edit: And as far as I can tell, not one of the extremely ethical and detail oriented women named Karen works for PayPal. Big tech companies rarely attract that kind of no-nonsense-tolerated top talent.
General advice is never use a debit card, use a credit card, it changes theft from a big problem to a manageable one.
I’ve heard this advice as well. It certainly doesn’t hurt, if you have credit cards, to prefer them.
I imagine it is a lot nicer to have a fraudulent item on a future bill, than an actual fraudulent deduction from a current active account. And fraud correction is prompt enough, that the bill never comes due on a CC, whereas the money is, indeed, missing immediately on a debit card.
That said, not having any credit cards, I would never open one simply for the fraud protection.
Debit card fraud correction has always been prompt and accurate, for me.
The card companies do not discriminate, currently, between corrections on credit and debit cards. Currently, that’s largely thanks to contract language with their debit card customers that prevents them from such discrimination.
I added disclaimers like crazy above, because FinTech is a constantly evolving industry with constantly changing terms of service. And because most people working in FinTech are assholes who want to scam you.
Edit: I’ve corrected the above advice with yours, thanks! There’s certainly no reason to prefer debit over credit for online use, for anyone who has both card types. I just have a bad habit of using the words interchangeably because I only carry debit cards.
In Spain (not sure about Europe in general) things are slightly different.
I have been living in Canada for 9 years, and there if you see a transaction you don’t recognize in your credit card statement you phone your bank and they take care of that.
Here in Spain you need to go do the police, file a report, then talk to your bank, then they’ll think about it.
So when I came back I was talking with some guys I know and they convinced me that, at least around here, it’s still a good idea to use Paypal. You also get faster refunds, etc (and that could be due to some European regulation, not sure).