Just sold something on the bay. Got a paypal message telling me the money won't be released for 21 days or until the buyer submits positive feedback. How long have that been doing this nonsense for?

God knows how the OFT are not all over paypal and eBay!

I had the same issue back in January and complained immediately to PayPal, primarily because I have an immaculate record going back over five years and they told me that, to quote, "there may be a higher than acceptable level of risk or exposure associated with your Account (based on the information available to PayPal at the relevant time and what in its sole discretion it regards as an acceptable level of risk or exposure to PayPal under all the circumstances)".

They initially told me that this was to become a permanent policy and that if I didn't like it I was at liberty to close my account. I told them that there was no point in my doing that as I still wanted to be able to pay using PayPal, and that I would just stop offering it as a mean of payment in my auctions. After hearing nothing back for a few weeks, I eventually received an email saying that because of my "consistently good performance" (even though I had not actually used PayPal in those few weeks) the restrictions on my account were being lifted.

Bunch of twits. Have you ever tried phoning them? Talk about a nightmare in automated response flavour!!1!

As above, I was one of the early adopters of ebay and laterally paypal – 100% positive feedback as both a buyer and seller over nearly 1000 transactions. Every single bl00dy time there's any sort of minor issue PP block the account, answer emails in cod-English and make decisions based on the logic of an autistic brontasaurus.

Ass-hats the lot of them.

It sucks, i'm in the same boat….100%+ve feedback, but still withhold my money. IMHO paypal now stacks the odds far too much in favour of the buyer.

I don't use Ebay that much but have had a big clearout in the garage and had quite a bit of stuff to get rid of.

I do think there's something wrong when I'm compelled to use their payment system with the associated fees but can just about swallow that. Having to pay postage and send goods off with the promise that I might get paid early if the seller remembers to give me feedback is just a nonsense.

Reported Ebay/Paypal to OFT before and got nothing but it might be time for another letter.