this post was submitted on 28 May 2024
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Privacy
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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 (in 2024!) to use your debit card there.
(Edit: To be clear, things have changed. Time travelers from the past should absolutely not follow this advice back in 2002!)
And when something does go wrong, you'll get better support from your credit union than PayPal would. (You don't still use a bank like a sucker, right...?!)
The worst case, usually, is they reverse the fraud and 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 successfully keep 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.
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).
Santander and Caixa are perfect examples of how to terribly handle fraudulent payment disputes. I worked in the industry is it's kinda well known they don't even follow scheme (Visa/MC) requirements and when you ask them to escalate to scheme they gaslight you.
Knowing this is the hoops you have to jump through in .es means it makes sense they don't have a robust anti-fraud process outside of .es.