Marketplace
Hi,
Recently I made 2 purchases through PayPal ($175.77 + $100) that the seller refunded immediately as they were having some issues on their end. Now I got confirmations of the money being paid and being refunded as separate emails within minutes of each other, however the money still seemed to be in my account and had not moved. Now I expected that whenever PayPal processes the payments, they will be debited from and then credited to my account within a short span of time considering the refunds were immediate, not really giving a second thought to this.
Unfortunately however, I had a very large unexpected expense the next day that pushed the account balance about $5 under $275.77 and during the course of the day while sorting things out I missed the notification that those two PP amounts had been debited and my account was now in negative by about $5. I wake up the next morning to CommBank having charged me a $5 "Unpaid payment fee" and then during the day they charged me another $10 "Overdrawing approval fee", presumably because I did not rectify the issue before midnight the night before.
Now the same day, PP refunds me the second transaction, $100, but not the first for some reason and I called to ask why that is, and after about 20 minutes of being juggled around by a machine, I finally get put through to someone in the US. This person now tells me that even though I'm looking at the transactions in my account where PayPal has deducted the 175.77 & 100 respectively, "they did not receive the money from the bank and will not refund it until they do" but then I still have a refund from PP for the second amount which she says was the completed refund. I went on to spend about 20 more minutes with her where she kept going around in circles saying that the first amount wasn't deducted, while my statement says otherwise, and then that the second was successfully refunded, but according to her, also wasn't removed from my actual bank account.
Overall I'm just really confused as to what is happening with the money, why the second was refunded but the first "cannot be refunded because it never left" and why I'm stuck with overdraft charges for amounts that "never left my account". I won't say I have no blame since I missed the notification telling me to balance my account, but further insistence that the money is still in my account is BS which means that I should still have the money and no fees.
I'm not really sure how to go about getting this issue rectified as I'm getting conflicting advice from both sides but is there any advice you guys have on how to sort out this mess?
Cheers and sorry for the long post
TL;DR