PayPal Accidently Double Charged – Double Withdraw Request

Oh, my! Just when you least expect to have an accidental mouse double-click event, it will happen!

PAYPAL ACCIDENTS WHEN LEAST EXPECTED

Today I intended to withdraw some funds from my PayPal account into my credit card / bank account, and after a confirmation dialog, I was literally left in shock to discover that PayPal charged me twice! Instead of a single $100 withdrawal request, there were listed two withdrawal requests totaling $200 US dollars.

Now, of the total $200 amount, $5 is charged per withdraw request, so I will end up with $190 in total when the transaction completes (bank fee is not taken into account, it varies between banks, and some do not take fees for amounts under $100).

And there it happen – my mouse clicked a little weird at that point when pressing the confirmation button, but I did not have any expectation that PayPal would “charge” me twice.

Of course, this is not another PayPal horror story, since the amount will end up in my wallet after all, but still, just a thought about how simply this could be avoided all together makes me a little frustrated at this moment.

I mean, just by the look of the User Dashboard inside PayPal, it feels like they never changed and upgraded the website design since founding. And of course, once you initiate Withdraw Funds Request, there is no way to cancel the pending order:

In the year 2015, where all kind of user-input errors do occur, PayPal does not have a simple double-click prevention mechanism built-in. And, the fact that this can be achieved with a single line of code with jQuery is even more frustrating, for example:

EXAMPLE 1 – jQuery Mouse Double-Click Prevention

$('button[type=submit], input[type=submit]').attr('disabled',true);

EXAMPLE 2 – jQuery Mouse Double-Click Prevention

// "*" selector will prevent any form controls on entire page
// "#SubmitButton" selector will prevent targeted submit button with element id="SubmitButton"
$(document).ready(function() {
    $("*").dblclick(function(e) {
        e.preventDefault();
    });
});

Of course, there are other, more complex and robust functions that could help PayPal users in prevention of accidental clicks on the buttons, but the point here is very clear: any financial website should implement at least some form of double- or multi- click protections to avoid this kind of trouble for their users.

CONCLUSION

Luckily, I had enough funds to withdraw in the first place, otherwise PayPal would issue a warning that the withdrawal amount must be less than the currently available total balance (plus withdrawal fee, which varies from country to country, and available options – it is usually around $ 4-5 per request). Oh, well, live and learn.

After all, this might not be entirely such a bad event in the end, I’ll just have some more cash than initially intended. However, I really hope that this article might help someone in the future… or maybe it will be already too late? A perfect example of Murphy’s Law.