Link Monkey is a scam. Paid a month ago and have yet to see one link. They never respond to emails. Now they say paypal shut them down so they went out of business.
Huh - that's harsh... I've heard about PayPal closing accounts in the past. I've gotta say, Link Monkeys did do some work for a friend of mine, and they did a good job. I could have been wrong all along though...
Link Monkeys is my company, and yes, I am Eric. This has been a very difficult end of the year for us as we have indeed been ripped off by PayPal. As the owner of the company, I take full responsibility. About two months ago, PayPal was not allowing us to withdraw funds. PayPal denied having anything to do with it so we invested in a new system thinking it was some type of fraud going on with the code of our site. We changed PayPal accounts (lost about $330.00 on that one) and business really picked up. The problem is, PayPal did the exact same thing the last week of November. Completely locked our account with no warning or explanation. Here is the real kicker, PayPal continued accepting payments, knowing full well that they were going to keep the money because they found a way to scam us legally. This time it was far more than $330.00. We had almost 600 clients so you can imagine what kind of money we had with PayPal. When we realized we could not access the money, we could not pay our reps, meaning we could not get links. I would have been more than happy to refund EVERY client that had paid in that time period, but PayPal would not let us do anything with the funds they were holding. We could not withdraw it, send it, or refund it. It was simply locked up. PayPal finally gave us an excuse and it was the final blow. In the TOS PayPal states that they can and will lock the account and keep the money if they find anything that they can deem "fraudulant". They say that because the account with PayPal was under one name, and the bank account it linked to was under another, they felt we were doing something wrong, end of story. No ifs, ands, or buts, it was over. My argument was that we were a company and many names went on many different documents and accounts and everything was not under one name. And besides, why would we send our money to "someone elses" checking account? That account was only used to send money TO, not FROM. PayPal crippled us, and clearly admits to it. To any clients out there all I can say is that I am sorry. If there were anything I could do I would not hesitate. I simply lost everything. I am trying to get back on my feet and am looking at options for link monkeys but have not come up with anything yet. Once we can recover the funds (PayPal says 180 days) I will definatly refund everyone who lost money along with us. Please know it was not intentional. Many have the same experience, just read about them all at www.paypalsucks.com . Our story is there as well. Anyone with further questions can e-mail me at linkmonkey AT gmail DOT com Warm Regards, Eric
Hello Eric Odom: The concept of 25 links for $10 seemed too good to be true but I thought I would make that small gamble. I received 5 links - then your problem occurred. When I wrote to you, you said I would receive a refund. This was over one month ago and this has not occurred. When I wrote to you again, I did not receive any response. What's happening?
Exactly the same as happened to my daughter....only she had close to $3000.00 frozen by Paypal.....this happened months ago yet she still can't get a reply from anyone at Paypal....just buck passing.....she has written off the money but it is a lesson to everyone with a Paypal account.....your money is not safe. And what was the money for that was in her account.....payment for website design. Not exactly fraudulant activity
That's what you get for relying on a company which is not technically a bank but an "electronic money institution" (and so escapes the regulators in many countries - although not in the UK) to handle all of your money. You also don't appear to have contact details anywhere on your site (if you do, I can't see an obvious link to them from the home page). I can see why many people would not want to deal with you because of this.
What a rotten situation! She should not have to write off such a large sum of money. Have you contacted the Federal Trade Commission? They are supposed to deal with issues like this.
PayPal was undergoing a class action law suit recently and did have to make some changes as a result. You should check and see if your issues fall under that category - some people i know got refunds
On the flip side, someone hacked into my PP account a few months back and immediately stole $1000 out of my account, supposedly as payment for "Web Traffic & Advertising". Luckily, I caught it pretty quick and was on the phone with them ASAP.. They immediately documented the problem, froze my account, and send me forms to show to my bank so they could decline the automatic withdrawl. Within 2 days, the money was back in my account. The wierd thing was that I never heard from PP again about the case, just reminders from time to time to reinstate my account (since I left it frozen). But overall, I was VERY impressed with how their fraud department handled a truly sucky situation.