Journal drinkypoo's Journal: Paypal has become an AI-assisted identity stealing platform 6

I suddenly got notifications that my Paypal password had been changed, and a passkey added to my account. There was a suspicious transaction for one cent right before it began to happen. I then started down the most frustrating AI-assisted rabbit hole I've yet experienced.

Long story short, paypal now puts a typically worthless AI chatbot in between you and phone support, and then another one in between calling the phone number, and speaking to a human. The phone chatbot is so worthless that it could not understand literally anything I was saying, and I talk to people on the phone for a living and am frequently complimented on my diction. This completely prevented me from speaking to a human on my first attempt.

Paypal also wouldn't let me remove my "primary" phone, which is a number to which I no longer have access. But when you try to call their phone support and they want to verify you're you, and you don't have a current code provided by the website after fighting the chatbot, the AI will only use a text message code sent to your primary phone to verify your ID.

Anyhoo, after fighting with that AI for several minutes, the system finally ID'd me with last 4 SSN and sent me to a human who ID'd me some more, and then we had to deal with that one cent transaction. Because Paypal was allowing this other user to add themself to my Paypal account, I removed all cards from the account so that it (hopefully) couldn't be used to do any damage. But then that left the one cent laying there, and Paypal won't close your account if you have a balance. So now I know what that transaction was for. However, they were able to reverse that transaction, which cleared the penny out of the account and allowed closure, and I have received the email notification of account closure.

I was a Paypal user from early days and this is literally the first problem I've had of any consequence, but given the severity, it was god damned sure going to be the last. But after experiencing their AI shitfest when I should have instead had an easy escalation to a security team prompted me to write this journal to warn anyone who's also become complacent about them that their system is essentially designed to aid and abet identity and account theft — because they will obstruct the living shit out of your attempts to address it.