Why is customer service so often as difficult to navigate as possible?

Let me share a story about Chewy and PayPal and the ridiculously frustrating $1000+ I have been chasing for two weeks now.

A few weeks ago, I woke up to a bunch of emails from my Chewy account saying I had purchased $1034 of stuff from them, changed my log in email, and updated my shipping address.

I did not.

And that is a lot of money.

After a deep, deep sigh, because this has been the year of bizarre extra fees and charges that have all been wrong but required hours of my time to sort out (like me being charged for the gas fees for my entire apartment building – repeatedly, or when my university had some kind of billing error, charged us all a full second amount of annual tuition and then sent us all directly into debt collection for not paying the fee none of us knew existed), I replied to those email stating it was fraud and I did not buy these things.

And got a form letter back saying no one reads those emails.

So then I tried to access Chewy’s customer service, hopefully without calling since calling America from England is always expensive/

And when I wasn’t sure that this was really going through to them, I logged onto PayPal to dispute the transaction which was surprisingly my major misstep.

Surprisingly because I have ordered a few things over the years that never arrived and PayPal was always good about getting my refund for me.

In this case, because I had opened a PayPal dispute, this created problems with Chewy.

So I bit the bullet and finally called them. It does seem crazy to me that phone calls are still required. I don’t think phones are really any safer than the internet (are they? I don’t actually know). And I don’t love that I don’t have a record of the interaction.

However, the Chewy customer service was pretty top notch. The woman was on it. She got back into my hacked account, disconnected all forms of payment, and flagged it for fraud. She figured out what they bought – a ton of cat supplies. She was going to immediately reimburse me but the PayPal hold on the account caused some issues and she wasn’t able to refund me.

Then began a fun dance with PayPal, who are also difficult to get a hold of – who first told me there was no issue because as on March 2021, I had an auto-payment to Chewy for my dog’s flea and tick. So this was an authorized payment, as far as they were concerned. I had cancelled that autopay more than a year ago, so I had to send in a dispute of their assessment. Then they agreed it was fraud but closed the case.

$30 later in phone calls, the problem was sorted. The money was refunded.

It seems like nonsense like this is just rampant these days, so some things I learned from this:

• If PayPal is involved, always go to the source first (like Chewy) and give them a chance to sort it before getting PayPal involved.
• If you catch it fast, it’s likely the source company can just cancel the order and refund you.
• Once you involve PayPal, it’s about to get real convoluted and slow to get your money back.

I am also considering opening a separate bank account and only keeping a small amount of money in it and connecting my PayPal to that one. This should minimize the potential damage next time some hacks one of my accounts, especially because bank accounts have way less fraud protections on them than my credit cards seem to have.

This was definitely more frustrating than the time some lunatic bought a ton of roombas with my credit card.

Have you ever had to deal with fraud?