Paypal verus Credit Card

Can you have both a credit card, and a PayPal account on your account? Or do you have to choose one or the other?

What if you have a credit card with Linden, but then you want USD cashed out to your PayPal account? Is just giving them your PayPal email address (which is all they seem to ask for) good enough? Can I do this, even if the PayPal account is not my method of payment with Linden, and has not been registered with them? Do they just verify with PayPal before processing?

If I have a verified PayPal account (one linked to a bank account) am I correct in assuming that Linden doesn't care whether the primary account on my PayPal account is a credit card, not the bank account? As long as I have provided PayPal with a bank account, and am therefore "verified?"

Just trying to understand this all, since so many people are having problems. I want to know the answers now, before i actually need to do something, so i will know how to do it, and what pitfalls to avoid.

I hope these questions make sense. Let me know if they don't!

And one final question: do you prefer to use PayPal or a credit card as your payment method on file with Linden? Why? (Ok, that was 2 questions!)

Princess Ivory

You can only have one method of payment on file at a time with LL. That can be a credit card or Pay Pal, and that method is what LL charges against for your mainland tier payments, premium membership renewals, group liabilities and Lindex purchases. Regardless of which method you have on file to pay money TO LL, you can request a payment/cash-out be made to you via Pay Pal. If your default payment method is Pay Pal, then cashing out will default to that account (but I believe you can change that on a case-by-case basis to any other valid PayPal address). If you have a credit card on file and ask for a Pay Pal payment to you, they will ask for your Pay Pal Address.

I've always used PayPal, because I prefer to pay up front rather than when the bill comes in. My credit card gets enough use in other areas.

My main account (this one) uses Pay Pal as my recorded billing method. Of my alts, roughly half are on Pay Pal and the rest are on a credit card. Not that it makes much difference for me now, as I haven't had to use either to pay money into LL more than once in the last year. I split the accounts evenly back when they were still quibbling over whether 5 accounts per payment method was a valid rule any more or not. (Supposedly it isn't, any more.) I figured in case I went over 5 total, I wanted some leeway on that limit. Also, when at least one of those alts was created, my Pay Pal at the time was out of funds, and payday wasn't for another couple weeks, but I had plenty of room on the credit card for the alt fee.

I used PayPal exclusively for 9+ months, but LL recently broke it somehow so I had to switch. Since the 13th, I get a 'restricted' message when I try to use PayPal, which LL says is PayPal's fault, not theirs. PayPal, on the other hand, says there's absolutely nothing on my account that would prohibit me from paying LL. Given that my PayPal works everywhere else I've tried it, including SL Exchange, and all the SL billing issues we've been having lately, guess who I believe?

Luckily, I have a Mastercard that acts like a credit card, but pulls from my PayPal account instead of a bank, so there are no interest charges. It seems to be working fine so far.

Ceera,

Do they all use the same PayPal address, or credit card, or do you have a separate one for each one of them?

I use one Paypal address for all the ones on PayPal, and one credit card for the ones on a credit card. Each account has its own e-mail address. All accounts have my Player's accurate real-world info attached, in the part of the registration form that only LL can see.

On a related topic,

What if I have an alt that I did not use correct info for at the time of creation, and no payment info on file, and I now want to make it "legitimate." If I update the billing section, with my real name and address, would that fix it for the av, or is the billing separate from the official av info? And I don't know where I would fix the date of birth, if I gave the wrong one.

Any ideas? I seem to remember something about Linden offering a way for people to fix their alts and make them legit, but I could be mistaken.

Now that they are not (at present) charging for an alt account, I'd like everything to be up to date, before they decide to start charging again.

Has anyone gone through this process of legitimizing your alt? Any suggestions?

Princess Ivory

Find a Linden in-world and explain that you're not certain if you used your legal name when you signed up for a particular alt, and that you want to edit the information to make sure it is your real name in the records. They can make arrangements for you to be able to edit that information. They mentioned that when they were starting to freeze accounts for apparently inacurate sign-up information.

I'd be tempted to ask for assistance in simply reviewing all my accounts - to be absolutely certain I didn't mis-type anything or click an opposite gender on some of the older ones. It's possible that on some of the ones that I have where the character gender doesn't match my Player, I may have clicked the gender of the character instead of my own. I have no way to tell, as I can't see all the data. I'd also love to be able to verify that a small handful of deleted accounts that I told LL to eliminate actually got deleted. I know at least one did not, because I can still find it in Search. Can't log on to it any more though, as I no longer recall the pertenant information for the pasword or for the password change challenges.

Paypal method doesn't seem to work.

CC doesn't work either .....rolls eyes!

According to the Blog, LL is having technical issues with Pay Pal at the moment, and has temporarily disabled payments by Pay Pal. They are working to get it resolved.

I've been going back and forth with LL about my issue since the 14th and they basically denied that it had anything to do with them (Bad PayPal! Bad! Bad!) until yesterday. THEN they said it was related to whatever the blog issue is...