An exercise by The Shift, looking into complaints by Bank of Valletta customers saying they had problems transferring money from PayPal to their accounts, confirmed the problem as well as a lack of knowledge at the bank’s customer care desk.

A BOV client highlighted the issue in a post on Wednesday on Facebook group Are You Being Served?, saying he had spent hours working on the issue with PayPal, a global online payment system, only to be told the problem lay with the Malta bank.

“Paypal has assured me that this is to do with BOV Compliance… and that ‘BOV did not do some paperwork’ and that Paypal is ‘waiting for BOV’,” he wrote.

The Shift went through the process of confirming whether other BOV clients were experiencing the same problem. Several attempts were made to transfer funds from a Paypal account to a BOV account on different days last week.

Each attempt made to transfer money was for a different amount, to eliminate the possibility of caps imposed on amounts transferred. Every attempt made to transfer money from a PayPal account to a BOV account, whether to credit card or deposit accounts, failed.

Yet attempts to transfer funds from the same PayPal account to credit cards and accounts held in other banks, including Revolut, met with no problem. This supported clients’ arguments that the problem was not Paypal, but BOV.

This newsroom then went through the usual channels available to BOV customers for support on a problem, including several extended periods of “waiting to be transferred” accompanied by the joy of Tina Turner. Eventually, a customer care representative came to the phone, and denied there was a problem.

When it was put to him that the problem occurred with different BOV accounts, he replied: “I don’t know. I don’t work for Paypal”. When pressed, he repeated that he had not received any complaints. Asked whether the bank had issued any information on the matter, he said, “no”.

The experience was similar to that described by the BOV client on Faceback where he was told by BOV that Paypal was experiencing a technical problem and that BOV did not know when it would be fixed.