Those who enjoy earning credit card rewards can’t help but be tempted by PayPal My Cash cards. These little seductresses can be paid for in many stores with a credit card. Each card can be loaded up to $500 at a time with only a $3.95 fee.
PayPal My Cash cards are ridiculously easy to use for running up credit card spend. You can buy these with a credit card; load the funds to your PayPal account; and then retrieve the funds in a number of ways: transfer to your bank account; send money to friends; spend the funds with a PayPal debit card (load Bluebird or Serve, for example); etc.
It’s a nearly perfect Perpetual Point Machine.
There’s one little problem…
If you do this, you’ll get shut down. You’ll eventually get a nice little email telling you: “Your account has been limited.” At that point, you can log into your PayPal account, but you can’t actually do anything useful with it. You can’t even withdraw any funds that are there. If you inquire, PayPal will tell you that your funds will become available after 6 months.
Don’t do it
It’s so hard to pass up an easy credit card spend opportunity like this one, but I strongly recommend against it. I’ve been there, done that. And, yes, I’ve been shut down. Worse, my innocent son’s teen account was shut down too. His funds were also frozen. This happened to us last year, but recently I’ve heard more and more reports of it happening again.
Here, for example, is one recent reader report:
Just a warning from my hard learned lesson.
Don’t use Paypal My Cash cards for your account EVER.
I had two warnings that the CSR explained were due to moving funds from My Cash cards to PP to my bank.
Fast-forward 6 months and I bought about 3K more to use for real purchases on eBay. All was fine until 4 months later PP permanently limited my account.
CSR said it was for my use of the cards 8 months back.
Appeal denied.
For visual learners, I’ve slightly modified PayPal’s flowchart showing how these cards work:
See also: How to cash in your PayPal My Cash cards when PayPal freezes your account
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So the PayPal my cash card has been discontinued. I have $500 sitting in one and have no way to redeem it, PayPal customer service says the card doesn’t exist?? I don’t know what to do
Luckily the temptation is gone since PayPal has discontinued PayPal My Cash. Unfortunately consumers cannot purchase PayPal Cash with a credit card (PayPal Cash is different from PayPal My Cash https://reloadpacks.com/paypal-my-cash/ it uses a barcode system and has an expiration date). PayPal My Cash also had other significant issues as well. It was used among scammers to scam people out of their money also there was a flaw in the card where employees could scam others using the card. Consumers were also experiencing significant amount of error codes when they tried to load My Cash into their PayPal account. I’ve had my PayPal account limited and funds for 6 months and let me just say, its not a good thing to go through. Great article and advice Frequent Miler.
Funny how m any ppl here dont get WHY paypal limits either account or use, its not allowed.
Neither by law (money laundering) or pay pals policy.
anytime the funds are not withdrawn from paypal account (to pay for services/goods or send to friends),
there is ZERO problem.
Seems like they are doing it again for a lot of people, my and wife got warning email yesterday. We had to fill a online affidavit after which a/c were unlocked.
My personal experience is this…if you can’t accept the risk and consequences then do not do it. I have personally had my PayPal account permanently banned (limited) because I did something that I was not aware of was against their terms of service. It was involving business transactions which were on their prohibited list. I was lucky enough to be able to create another Paypal account and spend money with it. I haven’t tried to receive payment and probably will not try to receive payment. This is significant because if you haven’t noticed if you try to create another account with Paypal you still have to input personal information to create your profile such as social security number and phone number which will flag in their system.
So, if you are willing to risk getting your Paypal account restricted for cash rewards or points it’s your prerogative but being that I actually had my account permanently banned I will agree with Boarding Area and advise against it. You may think losing Paypal is nothing until that certain store doesn’t accept your card or only accepts Paypal and you cannot use it. Yes, it even affects your purchasing power, if your frozen account has that card linked to Paypal.
it’s probably because of idiots like you, that they can no longer be purchased…and I only hope it’s temporary. I blame crooks always trying to “one up” a good system, and thus breaking it, for losing the cards.
The article is not even true. the MYCASH cards, can ONLY be purchased with CASH!!! (thus the term “mycash” card…it’s for people who don’t have credit cards but want to add funds to their paypal account, duh) Been using them for years…they are not supposed to be sold for anything except cash. I know I can’t purchase them with a card…if you can, your vender is selling them illegally. Proceed cautiously.
It depends on the store. Some stores allow them to be bought with a credit card. There is certainly nothing illegal about a store accepting credit cards for payment!
First you can buy this card with anything other then CASH!
Second if you load money onto this card with cash and then load it into your paypal and then transfer to a bank you are throwing a red flag! The only point of doing the above if to launder money. Sure I can see once or twice if you sold a car or something valuable. I have loaded thousands in cash cards and loaded my paypal up. I use my paypal debit card to make purchases and have never had an issue.
Look at the terms of the card, they are meant for online shopping only not to be withdrawn to your bank. Its your fault this happened.
I get it about the PayPal cards, it used to be so easy to reload them, Green Dot had their reload cards everywhere. Now it’s almost impossible to find the PayPal My Cash cards in any store and I live in Los Angeles. It’s not the stores fault though, I talked to several Managers and they told me that PayPal is not sending the cards to them. Typical PayPal since they married Ebay. Now as far as loading cash from a reload card and then taking it out from your PayPal card is highly suspicious especially when it’s large amounts. What’s the point of doing that just keep the cash don’t pay a fee to buy one of the PayPal my cash cards. I transfer funds from my bank now since I can’t find the damn reload cards anywhere, I use the card solely for 2 purposes, to buy from Ebay and to purchase items at the grocery store or even using it to purchase things from Amazon. I think that’s what PayPal had in mind, not to use is as a cash dispensary. I’m big big defending these idiots but I kinda see there point. I have had as much as $5000.00 on my card and used it just for purchases and I have never had my account limited or frozen. The big problems I have with them now is that for a company with billions in assets they have not issued cards with the new security chip, talk about dragging their feet. And another is the time it takes for transfers from your bank to PayPal, it happens quick with the bank but PayPal drags their feet on this too. I can transfer money to the care taker of my property in El Salvador in the afternoon and that money will be in his account the next morning, why can’t the most disgusting entities on this planet (PayPal, Ebay, and Banks) figure this out..
Mike works for Paypal
these cards have a fatal security flaw – i have a video where i tell you what the PIN# will be then scratch it off. employees are also embezzling. these are not made by paypal but by a company called incomm. please see my story here – http://www.igobyplane.com/2016/05/16/billion-dollar-paypal-my-cash-scam-partner-incomm-scam-got-busy-victim-blaming-me-while-i-got-busy-finding-their-fatal-security-flaw-and-embezzlers/
Mycash card is so ridiculous…
I paid cash + a activation fee so I could pay a purchase on Ebay USING paypal…. Yet they have a limit on how much you can transfer per day… Which they do not mention on the card itself.
Then you get home to find out they need to verify you after you have already been verified before.
I found a way around this, I had to use another web browser (FIREFOX) to get my funds into my paypal wallet… After spending 3 hours looking for a way to use my funds that I paid for….
This is completly unacceptable. They sale this card as an option to not use your bank account (they advertise this on the card)… yet they limit how much funds you can transfer per day? But they leave that part out until you get home and find out there are no refunds… Complete bull crap.
I’ve got an ideal, use the cards as they were intended. I sell items on Ebay and here locally. When I sell an item locally, I buy a My Cash card and add the funds to my PayPal account to use on Ebay, Amazon etc. If you’re going to put money in you bank account from your Paypal account, why not just put it in the bank to begin with? You can purchases paid for through PayPal from your bank account. Just a thought, and based on my own experiences. I’ve found out too that once you purchase a My Cash card and apply it to your account, if you reload it like I do, it automatically goes into your account without having to do anything. No logging in, giving PIN off card etc.
This whole article is BS.
First of all, you can’t buy these cards with a check or credit card. If you somehow managed it, you likely already committed fraud right off the bat. The reason is exactly to prevent the practice described here, which would be an easy way to commit credit card fraud.
Second, the whole point of these cards is to load your account with funds to spend via PayPal, not to transfer to your bank account. Making a regular practice of doing that is screaming “fraud” pretty damn loudly. The surprise isn’t that you were shut down, it’s that it took as long as it did.
Somebody who uses these cards in the manner intended will not have any problems with PayPal as a result.