I’m prefacing this by saying readers should avoid getting into a situation where this information would be useful. I’m providing this as reference.
My PayPal account has been restricted, and unrestricted, twice now. The same PayPal account. In so many places, I’ve seen people say once you have a PayPal account restricted, there’s no point in trying to get it unrestricted. I think that’s too fatalistic and, in my experience, wrong.
I’ve been using PayPal My Cash cards with my account for a little bit under a year now, and I’ve switched liquidation methods during that time. I maintain emphatically I have never breached the terms and conditions (and the service reps agree with me). Also during that time, I have been warned twice and received the “dreaded shutdown message” stating my account was limited. When I logged in during those events, it looked a bit like this.
Notice how the bottom says “This limitation cannot be appealed.” Reminds me of when I got banned from /r/churning for false accusations.
The first time this happened was in December of 2015, and I got my account unblocked after two days. The second time this happened was, as indicated by the above image, on 20 January 2016, and I got my account reactivated that same day.
My account was reactivated both times after I sent a sternly worded message stating I hadn’t violated any terms of use and that I had contacted multiple representatives immediately after each warning to confirm that my activities were not prohibited.
Personally, I’ll be laying off My Cash cards for the foreseeable future because the things I’ll be doing are definitely not allowed in conjunction with My Cash funds, but this should show that a PayPal shutdown isn’t reversible, despite what people may say.
The main point of this post is that it’s not necessarily impossible to get an account unrestricted. I’m not even advocating someone go to extreme lengths; I just used the message center. Again, you should avoid getting into a situation where this would even be remotely applicable, but really, nothing ventured, nothing gained.