> In my country (Belgium), the government has tools to let people find and reclaim money they may be owed that is sitting in bank accounts. But something like PayPal is not really able to do this.
In the US, there's also a system of unclaimed property, administered by each state. States hold onto such property, and at least the few states I've lived in allow you to search online for it, and provide a means to have it sent to you on request. I've found a couple hundred dollars over the past 20 years, mostly cases where I've overpaid some sort of account, and then the account was closed, though I recall one case where Google had been the one to submit some unclaimed property to the state in my name (never found out what it was from).
PayPal could certainly set an inactivity limit -- say 5 years -- and then turn the funds over to the state listed in the account's user information. But they'd rather keep the money, and slowly siphon it off. I agree that this is a pretty bad money grab, but there's absolutely another option that would allow a PayPal user to reclaim that money later on.
In the US, there's also a system of unclaimed property, administered by each state. States hold onto such property, and at least the few states I've lived in allow you to search online for it, and provide a means to have it sent to you on request. I've found a couple hundred dollars over the past 20 years, mostly cases where I've overpaid some sort of account, and then the account was closed, though I recall one case where Google had been the one to submit some unclaimed property to the state in my name (never found out what it was from).
PayPal could certainly set an inactivity limit -- say 5 years -- and then turn the funds over to the state listed in the account's user information. But they'd rather keep the money, and slowly siphon it off. I agree that this is a pretty bad money grab, but there's absolutely another option that would allow a PayPal user to reclaim that money later on.