paypal customer service sucks

[Neil]

so i get a payment sent to my email (A) the other day, only my paypal account is registered to my older email (B) so i need to add the newer one to my account to claim the money. i try adding it, it tells me the email address has already been added to another account. i check my emails in A and find i got an email from paypal a couple months ago saying A had been added to a paypal account and asking for confirmation that i was somebody called christine. it had a link to click to confirm it, but didn't have a link to click if i wasn't that person, and no information on what to do. the person had a similar last name to me so i assume they were trying to add the email of a family member called neil and got it wrong. anyway, it's added to their account now and even though they can't confirm it, i can't use it either.

so i send an email to paypal explaining this as clearly as possible, they send me an email back telling me i need to phone them so they can check my account details or some crap, which is obviously irrelevant and pointless because the only thing they need confirmation of is that i own email A and the only way to confirm that is by email. so i reply saying that all they need to do is remove the email from the persons account, and point out the fact that since it's been unconfirmed for 2 months it's quite obvious it's not their email. now they've replied that i should sort out the email problem with my internet service provider because they've probably given the same email to multiple people (what the fuck? and this is a hotmail address by the way). they go on to say that if my payment has been sent to an 'inaccessable email' i need to contact the sender and get them to send it to another address. so that's fucking helpful

basically because of their shitty system you can just permanently claim email addresses on your paypal account, and even if you can't confirm they're yours and they serve no purpose to you, the real owner will never be able to use them. and because of their dumbass customer service they won't even understand the problem when you explain it to them

[James]

tl;dr

Have you tried phoning them?