Intelius people search much less useful now.

For anyone who has used, is using, or considering using the service Intelius — just be forewarned that it appears they now redact all actual birth dates when doing a search for a person. Not because they don’t have the data, they do. This is how they are able to collate it all together. But they are beginning their own demise by redacting information when it is supposed to be an information resource. This is so counterintuitive that it just begs for another company to take the lead and begin doing things right.

Whatever the reason, the information is available elsewhere and is of public record in the majority of cases. I don’t believe I’ll be paying a monthly fee (esp. considering it can be $25+/month now) for redacted information. I’ll seek out another service.

Any suggestions for a better service to use please fee free to leave a comment!

–Josh

pfSense HTTP_REFERER error

I’m just sharing this so my spent frustration can possibly help someone else. If you’re setting up pfSense in a VM container, or otherwise can’t access pfSense via a local LAN IP for initial setup, then this information might save you some headache. Every time the devs were asked about this, or to make it easier on people in this situation, their answer was to set up a machine on the local LAN. Not overly helpful.

The error that this will help with, will be similar to:

An HTTP_REFERER was detected other than what is defined in System -> Advanced (http://192.168.0.1:8080/). You can disable this check if needed in System -> Advanced -> Admin.

So, as long as you have console access to pfSense (or access via SSH) then we can work around this error. Since the error message suggests changing a setting in the Webconfigurator, which obviously you can’t access, it’s not very helpful either.

So, this is pretty straightforward. From the pfSense console, enter 8 (or the option for Shell).

Then, type the below, pressing ENTER after each double-backslash that you see below, and then enter at the very end.

sed -i -e '/<webgui>/a\\
<nodnsrebindcheck>yes</nodnsrebindcheck>\\
<nohttpreferercheck>yes</nohttpreferercheck>\\
' /conf/config.xml

There should be no feedback after this is done. Then, type exit, hit enter and use the option to reboot.

The only other command you might need, is only applicable if you can’t get the login screen to appear. Be forewarned, that if you use this command below that you should get your configuration done and restart as soon as possible. This command disables the firewall completely. Type the below after using option 8 (for Shell) from the pfSense main menu:

pfctl -d

Well, I hope this helps someone. Whenever I waste time on something like this, I like to try to save someone else some time!

Shoot me a comment if this helped you out!

–Josh

UniFi Dream Machine (UDM, UDM Pro, UDM Pro SE) admin lockout

I’ve emailed Ubiquiti support about this, created a forum post, included screenshots and verbose SSH client logs. I’m writing this as I sit without access to a clients firewall because of this bonus feature in these products.

The result of my diving into the packets and testing thoroughly is that, whenever there is a failed SSH login attempt it causes the firewall to go into a “block any attempts” mode. This is unlike any other server out there, which might rate-limit the offending connection or blacklist after so many failed attempts. Ubiquiti products prevent any login, even legit connections. The connection establishes just fine, but it just seems to drop. So if you’re experiencing this — where any attempts to SSH into a firewall just end with a dropped connection, you may well be dealing with this yourself.

The only solution is to go to the firewall’s settings and modify the rule that you have for SSH forwarding. You’ll have to lock it down to whatever IP address you’re coming from at this time, and then wait 5-10 minutes for the server to become accessible again. Then going forward, if you don’t want to have to deal with this you’ll have to go into the settings each time and modify that IP to whatever your source is.

Here’s hoping that they fix it sometime soon. It always gets me at the most inopportune times, last time I did not have any UI access due to the internal web server failing to communicate. Also, the firewall was showing “offline” on the UniFi management portal. So I was left to repeatedly click to attempt the connection until finally I was able to get a connection in.

If it’s not clear, the reason this happens is because there is some random port-scanner that is trying to use JimBob to log in. Result: everyone locked out for a period of time. Could be a bad scenario if this begins to be used intentionally as a type of DoS tool.

Oh, and the screenshot I included is another fun variant of its’ behavior. It will finally connect after 150 tries, only to hang on the login banner. Sending a Break here causes the session to terminate (unlike Break at a shell prompt). So yeah, pretty neat all around!

–Josh

JDownloader protects you from yourself!

This is just a very short gripe about the open-source utility JDownloader.

It’s a great tool for downloading all kinds of data from the Internet. Does much of the “leg work” involved with tedious download tasks. Very versatile, many plugin capabilities, endless customization. Almost.

I was disheartened to learn how the modification of the default “User-Agent” string is not available to users. This setting is one that users easily change in browsers, and many other utilities out there. While I understand the reasoning behind preventing users from easily modifying it, there are other ways to mitigate the PEBKAC errors. For instance:

1. If modified then a popup warning could appear at each launch with some stern verbiage about “If it’s not working, you probably broke it… if you’re having trouble, you should restore the default. would you like me to restore the default? Y/N”.
-or-
2. Modifications could be session-only, thus auto-remediating at each launch.

I guess, rather than rant on my blog about this I should propose it on the official forum. But as it happens, it’s down at the moment, so here I am.

Also, I’d have to try to act surprised if I saw responses to my proposal such as these:

“if you want to override this yourself, easiest solution is run a proxy and change via the proxy.” — raztoki (JD Developer)

“but if ppl just start changing UA themselves, guess who they gonna ask for help or complain when plugin breaks/fails.” — jiaz (JD Developer)

The bottom line is, there are plenty of advanced users that don’t want to edit source code and compile, or run a proxy server, to achieve this trivial change.

If any JD developer do happen to read this post, THANKS for your contribution to what has become an incredibly amazing and sophisticated tool. I know that people don’t take the time to thank the devs for their hard work enough. How many man hours have been saved as a result we’ll never know! I hope my comments above can be taken constructively, in order to help an already amazing tool become that much more useful.

Thanks for reading!

UniFi Network Server self-hosting; first signs of demise

I just noticed today, while reading the specifications on the UXG-Lite (seemingly touted as a successor to the USG)

First, they’ve remove the programmable second port that could be assigned to WAN2, for failover. This was in the previous compact USG device, but now we’re left with the only option of buying a device at least 6 times the size to accomplish the same task.

That aside, the reason for my post is because of a few asterisks I noticed in the specifications.

The primary heading reads:

Managed with a CloudKey, Official UniFi Hosting, or UniFi Network Server

Official UniFi Hosting, From $29.00 /month (Subscription)

Scroll down, and in the “Gateway Features” section, there’s a subsection named “Advanced networking” that reads:

License-free SD-WAN*
WireGuard, L2TP and OpenVPN server
OpenVPN client
OpenVPN and IPsec site-to-site VPN
One-click Teleport* and Identity Enterprise VPN**
Policy-based WAN and VPN routing
DHCP relay
Customizable DHCP server
IPv6 ISP support

*When paired with a Cloud Key or Official UniFi Hosting.

**When paired with a Cloud Key.

This seems to suggest that they are integrating special features into the “Official UniFi Hosting” and they’re not running the same product that they provide for download to the public. So, they’re not offering just the hosting, but in essence a different product altogether.

What this points to seems to be the next steps in quietly muscling out the self-hosted option and forcing the Ubiquiti-controlled products only. For those that want to continue to self-manage, it looks like more and more features will likely be removed in an effort to push you to buy in to their system.

This, coupled with the new “UI Care” product, has me worrying that the quality is soon to be going downhill. I hope I’m wrong, as I’ve enjoyed using and installing their products over the years.

Evernote search limitations

For any of you who use Evernote on a regular basis, you already know it quickly becomes a very handy resource to store thoughts, phone call notes, work-related notes, and pretty much anything you need to have at-hand. I also use the camera scan tool to scan receipts and documents, because it can fix the perspective of the scan to flatten it (i.e. when taking a photo and preventing the flash glare). It then scans any PDFs or scanned notes and allows the text to be searched. What’s more, from the days that I used Livescribe (the regular ink pen that writes on special paper and digitizes notes) I can search within any of my handwritten notes as well!

All this is great! You can search all of your notes with some various syntax terms which makes searching work pretty well.

I was frustrated recently when I was required to purchase the higher tier of subscription, despite the fact that I’d always been a subscriber to the “Pro” tier. They renamed “Pro” to “Personal”, then added a new “Professional” tier that was required in order to do Boolean searches. I needed this for one simple purpose: I needed to find notes I’d made in a specific month. There was no way to just search for “month:January year:2019” You must get this higher tier plan, then you can search “created:20190101 NOT created:20190201”.

I was slightly more frustrated when I found that Evernote arbitrarily removes the note edit history for notes older than two years. It’s not actually removed, but the times are all zeroed to 12:00AM, so finding the time between edits is no longer possible for those notes. This is only a problem if you needed this information for calculating work times or similar. (Which I happened to have done). Support provided no help when I contacted them about this. (Here’s a few examples). Be sure to scroll past the images and read the biggest problem I’ve encountered!

I was very frustrated when I found that Evernote’s search doesn’t work right for basic search whenever a URL or text appearing to be a URL is involved. Note that the text need not be “hyperlinked” to exhibit the symptom. I’ve emailed support on several occasions with very detailed examples of the problem. I think it best that I just include my most recent message to support below, so you can see my explanation of the problem. Before I paste that message, though, I want to mention that I repeated the exact same tests within the macOS built-in Apple Notes application and the problems exhibited within Evernote do not exist. If I didn’t have nearly 25,000 notes and a plethora of tags, an edit history on the notes, and create date, I’d migrate over to Apple Notes in a heartbeat.

September 18, 2023

I’ve been a longtime Evernote user, and sort of struggled with this here and there but I figured that I just needed to change my search syntax or something. Today, after digging even deeper into the problem (out of necessity), I’m finding that something completely bizarre appears to be true.

If I have a note that has a Web URL within the note, for example, http://www.magnets-r-us.com, and I search Evernote using simply the word “magnet” — this note is excluded from the results.

Taking it a step further, I try a few other searches to see what will give me my note in the results:

magnet* does not
*magnet* does not
magnets does not
magnets-r-us does not
magnets-r-us.com does not
www.magnets-r-us.com DOES

Now, since I’m composing this message in Evernote, I tested against this as well. Searching for the word ‘magnet’ does show this message in the results, and also highlights the word ‘magnet’ in the ‘magnets-r-us’ link above. But if I change the search to ‘magnets-r-us.com’ then I get nothing.

I also added some text into the same note: reallybizarreproblems.arentpleasant.net but was careful not to allow it to be converted into a hyperlink. This text exhibits the same behavior, in that my search results are:

pleasant = no result
arentpleasant = no result
arentpleasant.net = no result
really = no result
reallybizarre = no result
reallybizarreproblems = no result
reallybizarreproblems.arentpleasant.net = result

A VERY important note on this is that, if my note includes the standalone text (i.e. pleasant, arentpleasant, etc) from above, in addition to the Web address/hyperlink, then it WILL appear in search results and will ALSO have the problem phrase highlighted as well. So, for example, if I create a note that contains the text:

Beginning of note. Visit confusingproblems.org for more details. It has indeed been confusing.

… Then a search for the word “confusing” will find this note, and the results window will show BOTH the web address and the standalone word “confusing” to be highlighted. Remove the standalone word “confusing” and the note will no longer match without searching for the entire web address.

This problem is easily replicated across platforms and devices.

Please advise as it’s beginning to near the level of unusability for me due to the number of important notes that are missed when I search for them. The only way to locate the note, without knowing the entire URL (or whatever other special text it may be — password, etc) is to manually peruse all of my notes individually. Or I can export everything and use built-in macOS search functions to locate these simple phrases via Spotlight search.

Please advise if this is a known issue, if there is a fix in the works, or what more you need from me. I’ve given you enough information to replicate the problem.

voxpro / suntechpc – eBay seller of SIM cards, etc.

This is just a very brief post to hopefully save some others some grief when looking at options for cellular data. Now going under the username suntechpc this seller was offering “Bring your own SIM” as well as “Purchase our SIM” options for T-Mobile data SIM cards. There were some listings claiming $25.00 after tax, per month, and others with a higher price tag. This is overall a pretty good deal, but there are a few things to be aware of with this seller:

Billing

The pricing shown is only available if you submit your checking account information within their QuickBooks payment portal
Paying via a credit card will add additional processing fees
They will initially try to charge your card more than once in a 30 day period.
If there is any problem with your card, within 5 days they will terminate the service
Service may not be able to be reinstated, as in my case, where they are claiming they are “at capacity”
If service can be reactivated, there is a $10.00 fee (plus any fees associated with using a debit/credit card)
Technical

SIM card can only be used in a mobile phone device
If used in an unmodified hotspot device, it will quickly deplete the limited amount of hotspot data allowed

The price is pretty good, for sure. But it’s important to be aware of the above so you don’t waste time or money!

When I initially realized there was an issue with the payment card (it was a verification that the bank wanted) I emailed the seller right away to let them know, and to ask them to reattempt the charge. I think, had the issue come up while I was within the timeframe to leave feedback on eBay, that things may have been different. Who knows.

Apple is officially in fail mode. Really.

I really can’t believe I’m writing something that sheds such a negative light on Apple. They’ve always done the right thing in my book, and I’ve been able to get support where needed. Well, today that table just turned. Aggressively.

I’ll let you read my original post, but to sum it up I was basically denied a refund request despite my offering video evidence of the app failure. I tried to appeal, but was again denied. I called Apple and got nowhere (except for the first agent erroneously stating he could help and initiating refund requests for the wrong items).

So, even though purportedly Apple does not monitor the Apple Communities forums, I decided I would post there and see if anyone else had encountered a similar situation. I really didn’t want to initiate a chargeback with my card. So, I wrote a long, partially ranting but honest post. I provided some guidance for anyone else just starting on the “refund” route. About an hour after making the post, I was surprised by a notification that I’d received an email from Apple regarding my post! I hurriedly opened the email only to find that, yes — an Apple employee DID, in fact, read my post. However, because it wasn’t constructive they just went ahead and deleted it for me. And they thanked me for being an Apple customer and gave me links to buy some more Apple stuff.

REALLY?

So an Apple employee took the time to read about the situation that I was in, genuinely not wanting to initiate a chargeback on my Apple Card — and instead of at least offering even a morsel of help, they just deleted my post for me and went ahead and made sure that I couldn’t get any insight from any “Apple Community” members. Not much of a Community when there are employees roaming the forums whose sole job is to eliminate any material that might cast a negative light on Apple. And empty the Trash after you remove it, too!

Well, Apple, I’m sorry to say but — for the time being, you aren’t able to impede on my free speech outside of your “Community”. I’ll be giving things a serious re-think over the coming days. In an interesting twist of fate, I ordered an Android phone today before all of this happened. It was just going to be a spare, and something I could use to “keep up” with the latest Android OS changes.

I really want to believe that everything that’s transpired has just been a series of extremely rare aberrations. At any rate, it would appear that gone are the days of Apple actually listening to their customers. Oh, you can get on a live chat nearly instantly if you want to buy something.

I’ll include the email I received from Apple also, and here’s my original post that I put on Apple Communities:

This is only for $8.96 in in-app currency, but in my response to Apple’s declined refund request I offered to provide video evidence of the error in the app wherein the currency was delivered but instantly disappears. I was floored to see that they still denied all 4 requests even when I offered to send them this evidence.

I really don’t want to perform a chargeback, but it seems like Apple has left me no choice. I did call in and the first agent said he could help, but he requested refunds on the wrong purchases so I canceled those refund requests. The second agent I spoke with told me there was nothing she could do.

She said that I needed to just dispute the transaction, after which I will have to call Apple to get my account re-enabled. She said “It’s no big deal for just one chargeback, but if you have another one they will ban your Apple ID for life. But you should be fine to do one!” I asked, “does this mean that I lose access to my 4TB of iCloud Drive storage, digital assets, purchases, etc?” She said that I would retain access to my purchases, but my Apple ID would be disabled permanently. So I’m not exactly sure how that would work. But if they ban my Apple card from being used for Apple purchases, well that quickly eliminates one of the primary benefits of the card.

I’m just ranting and disappointed that there’s nobody to contact at Apple whom you can actually explain the circumstance of your problem to. Because obviously whoever reviewed my comments when I requested further review, either didn’t speak English or didn’t actually read my comments. I’m leaning toward the latter because all four “re-decline” notifications came in, one after another — with about 5 seconds in between each.

I spend easily over $100 per month on Apple digital purchases, so for them to overlook the account longevity and decline a refund for $8.96 really has me wondering where the humans are at Apple. Because they’re obviously not customer-facing. At least, not where it matters.

It’s the principle of the matter.

If anyone has any suggestions for alternatives to my filing a chargeback/dispute, then I’d greatly appreciate your sharing. I’m sure that I’m not the only one in this predicament.

For anyone that happens upon this post, if you haven’t already then the best place to start is at the https://reportaproblem.apple.com website. Sign in with the Apple ID used for the purchase, and review the list of charges. You’ll hear back from Apple within 48 hours or so after submitting the refund request.

–Josh

KuCoin — only worthwhile if you fit their “mold”

What I mean by the title is, basically if everything works then things will probably go pretty smoothly for you. But if you encounter issues with ID verification, failed card transactions, or if you accidentally connect using a VPN even once… you might as well call it a day with KuCoin.

I have joined several other platforms and had no issues getting verified and getting things going quickly.. Not the case here. The primary problem, I believe, is that their primary language is not English. Worse, they make little-to-no effort to ensure the translations are accurate. They have purposely ambiguously worded the promotion details so it is confusing to newcomers. I offered them a better translation that included the correct wording, but they did not even acknowledge that I sent it. I only joined because my cousin referred me. They did NOT honor the bonus as outlined in their promotion terms. In trying to open a dialog about this, they just send the same canned response every tIme. Getting verified has been a complete and utter joke. I took several professional DSLR photos that were super crisp. Waited 2 weeks after submission and received a response that I failed to specify what kind of ID card it was. (I know it can be confusing to figure out that something labeled Driver License is a drivers license). So I specified the type of ID (again) and submitted. Mind you, that’s the only thing they let me add was the Id type. So after 2 more weeks, I get another message that says “Don’t use symbols in the name”. What??! Like most people, I only have alphabetical letters in my name. Why would I have submitted anything else? Maybe my password management was having a bad day. Okay, resubmit, typed my first name. I’ll try to act surprised when it comes back in 2 more weeks and says “last name cannot contain Hieroglyphics”.

I submitted a ticket telling them I couldn’t access the trading bot to view or modify my active bots….4 days ago. Still unable to access. This is on a 2021 iPad Pro.

If you value your time, and your sanity, then steer way clear.

They are happy to take your money but they continue to have poorly translated rules and terms (I originally noted this issue 2 years ago!). I even set up a new account, using my phone number only and attempted to make a deposit after verifying my ID. Still won’t accept any deposit using any personal debit card that I have. These debit cards work fine with other platforms. I understand that it works out much better for them if they crank up the security to maximum, as they’re very unlikely to have any disputes etc. However, if they’re not going to have knowledgable support on-hand to assist when the transactions fail, then what’s the point?

KuCoin seems like a great platform, and worthy of the extra efforts to get an account into a functional state. But, with the issues related to support when it comes to anything going wrong, they are among the worst that I’ve ever encountered. That being said, I don’t know that I would be very comfortable having any significant amount of cryptocurrency stored here. It’s altogether too difficult to get any assistance if there’s a problem.

If you have had a similar experience, but you like the KuCoin platform for some of the other features, then all that I can suggest is that you use another exchange for purchasing the currency first. Then, transfer only what you need to use within KuCoin. Transfer back out as soon as the currency becomes dormant again.

TL;DR KuCoin seems to be primarily about what’s convenient to them. To build a money-making machine with least amount of complication, they simply block anyone with even the slightest hint of causing them trouble. While this is prudent, they should have procedures to then “whitelist” the false threat detection.

I’ll post another review or two about other viable platforms once I’ve spent more time with them.

If your only PayPal account is a Business account, then read this.

I’ve had PayPal since they were their own company, unrelated to eBay. PayPal has always been a very convenient way for friends and family to send funds between one another, with relatively good security.

TL;DR If you only have one PayPal account and it is a Business account, then you should either create a new, personal PayPal account or ask PayPal to convert your Business account over to personal. This way you’re able to receive Friends & Family payments when applicable, and not pay 3% in fees.

At one point, I was encouraged by PayPal to convert my account over to a Business account. I went ahead with it, because there were no drawbacks to switching and a couple of added features. After switching to the business account type, many payments began to default to the “Goods or Services” option when others would send money. Also, by default, when using any website integration the payment is classified as “Goods or Services” with no ability to change it. The same is true of any payments made via PayPal.me links, when the account is a business account.

I could still, however, receive payments from friends and family without fees when they selected the “Friends and Family” option when sending money from their account.

This may seem like a minor detail, but keep reading. Hopefully you’re already aware of this, but what this meant back then was that any of the “non-F&F” payments received would count against the IRS Reporting threshold. This threshold used to be a reasonable amount: No reporting was done if you were under both 200 transactions and US$20,000 per calendar year. Going over this would necessitate the reporting of all transactions beyond those limits as well as all prior transactions for the year (excluding F&F).

If you’d like to read the fine print on this, click here to view the PayPal User Agreement from 2017 (via WayBackMachine). Search for “200” within that page and you’ll find the right section.

Then, in contrast, click here to view the 2022 User Agreement. (Search for 600 within this document)

Why 600?

Because, as part of the bills passed during COVID and within the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 they slipped a couple of bonuses in there for us to help everyone recover from the pandemic.

Among these bonus items, after they realized that some Americans were receiving exorbitant amounts of money from reselling clothes and household items on eBay, and accepting payments with Venmo at their garage sales, (*long, Office Space Lumbergh stretch*)… Yeah, we just went ahead and…. fixed that glitch. Mmmm-kay? Great. Now that I’ve got the Office Space dramatics out of my system, in regular English this means:

Reporting Requirements
Before 12/31/2021: 200 transactions or US$20,000, per year.
After 12/31/2021: 1 transaction or US$ 600, per year

Now that you realize the minor adjustment they made to the reporting thresholds, the next point will come into better focus.

A few months ago, a family member sent me $10 or so to pay their part of a dinner tab. I just happened to notice on my PayPal account that this came across as a payment for Goods & Services, so I promptly refunded the transaction and told them to send it with F&F. I checked on my desktop, using the PayPal web site and indeed I was able to select F&F without issue.

After a repeated incident with another family member, one who was adamant that there was no option to change to F&F, I inspected further. It appeared that PayPal had changed the iOS app such that it didn’t prompt for the type of payment while sending money.

(Bear in mind, that recipients are stored in your “Contacts” within PayPal and they have(had) an option for each one indicating what the default payment type would be–Goods/Services or F&F.)

I thought it was just a glitch within the iOS app so I directed them to use the full website, which worked at that time.

No longer does it work. Apparently PayPal had been hinting at the removal of the F&F payment option within Business accounts for some time now. But I don’t recall receiving any type of account notice from them about this.

The next day, after I proceeded to send PayPal customer service a message after reading this Quora page along with a couple other similar pages. See, I had set up a separate PayPal account some years ago which I use exclusively for business payments. But, until now, there wasn’t much reason to pursue changing my account type on my non-business account.

This was about a month ago that I sent them the message, as of this writing, and I’ve not heard anything back from them on it. I really don’t want to set up a brand new PayPal account for use as a personal account. So, I waited patiently to let them do their thing as I was sure they were probably inundated with requests from others to do the exact same thing to their business accounts.

However, it having been over a month now, I decided to go ahead and call PayPal to make sure that it got done.

Been a long time since I needed to call PayPal for anything, and let me tell you: PayPal customer service is nothing like it used to be.

They used to answer your call promptly, and have well-trained agents ready to tackle any problem you threw their way. This time, the first agent I spoke with told me she needed my email address from the account I wanted to convert. I gave her two of the registered email addresses from the account, but she couldn’t locate the account using either of them. (Spelled slowly, one letter at a time) I ended up giving my phone numbers (uniquely attached to this single account), among several other things. Ultimately I had to provide a full transaction ID number for her to find the account.

Once she did, she said that my account had a limitation and I wouldn’t be able to send or receive any funds until it was resolved. Because of this, she would have to transfer me to an account specialist. I asked her how there had been a card approval on my PayPal debit card on the same day as this call, and she dodged the question. I agreed to wait, thanked her for her help, and patiently waited. She came back a couple minutes later, and said that she would be transferring me now.

Great, I thought. This probably won’t take too long. 90 minutes later I decided to go ahead and place another call to PayPal using my landline while I had the 2 minute music loop going on my cell phone. I spoke with someone within 5 minutes, and when I asked if the other line was just a perpetual hold she explained how busy they were.

I didn’t think, “Oh, that makes sense”. But I still just explained what I needed and she said she could try to convert the account for me. She asked me to wait, which I did for about 5 minutes.

After the wait, she explained that she did try but was unsuccessful. She said that the system had been having problems with converting accounts every so often, so I should try again in 48 hours. I asked if she was submitting a ticket for this issue, and she claimed she was. She also claimed I’d be receiving a follow-up email about this issue. I’ll not be holding my breath and fully expect I’ll need to call again.

I disconnected that second call after the timer had hit about 20 minutes. The first call that was still on hold was, still on hold. I disconnected that call when it was about 1 hour 45 minutes. After finding a prototype of the speed-dial console popular with customer service these days, I think I know where I got placed. (See photo) (Kidding…)

I’ll update this when (and IF) I’m able to get my account converted over to a personal account again. In the meantime, my suggestion to you is that if you only have one PayPal account and it is a business account — then you’d better either create a secondary account for personal use, or contact PayPal to try to get yours converted. If you wait until you need to make a transaction, and create the new account on-the-fly, you’re all but guaranteed to have your account be limited while they review it.

All of this sure does make Cryptocurrency all the more appealing at the end of the day — despite the volatility.

Let me know your thoughts on this subject, and any alternatives you’re using instead of PayPal if you switched.

Thanks for reading, and I hope this didn’t come across as a long rant — I try to summarize my experiences so you can hopefully avoid the same frustrations.

~Josh