Does PayPal deactivate access automatically on dispute or refund?

Something really bizarre happened with a recent customer. They couldn't access the product that they paid for. I checked his account and there was an invoice with payment made with PayPal, but no access records to the product he purchased.

So I added it in manually.

A few hours later, I notice that the original records (from the paid invoice action) had reappeared.

It may have been because the customer raised a dispute with PayPal. He wasn't sure he wanted the product. And then when he couldn't log in to his account, he complained to me. After the issues were resolved, he wrote to PayPal to cancel the dispute and that's maybe when the original records reappeared.

I have the standard PayPal plugin with IPN configured in the standard way (I think).

Is this something that goes on behind the scenes? Wouldn't there be some kind of system message to let me know what's going on? Or is it a glitch in the system? Should I install a different version of the PayPal plugin (express or pro)??

I still have version 4.7.2 by the way.

Oh, okay, that explains it then.

How can I override this or modify the settings? I don't want access to be revoked on a dispute (it was resolved, so no need for a refund).

Improvement request: if there is a dispute or refund raised by PayPal, which then gets actioned by amember, then please send an email notification to admin that this has occurred.

Paypal disputes almost always end up in the customers favor or if not, takes a fair amount of time to be settled (unless like in your case, it was a user who doesnt bother to deal with support and goes right to paypal first). Would you want the customer to have access for up to a week for the dispute to work itself out, with the possibility of a refund in the end, and a user who used your service all that time?

Paypal sends an email out on these events as well.

Not to mention, if you are a small shop selling digital goods who may be out of the office on weekends for instance, someone signs up on saturday morning, opens dispute and in your case, would use the service all weekend until monday morning where he would get a refund, knowing all along that is what he was going for.

To me, with a fully automated billing system like amember, a paypal dispute is an exception to the process requiring manual intervention to clear up and take care of. I guess your special request would be useful depending on what is being sold but to me would start to be a potential liability.

swintec, that sounds all fine and reasonable - but any customer who wants to milk or abuse the system can still do so by raising a case with paypal within 30 DAYS of the purchase (in some cases as much as 60 days). He doesn't have to do so surreptitiously over a mere weekend.

ceaser, could you enter this is a feature request - to be able to configure the settings, either fully automatic or manual intervention. In addition, an admin email should be sent each time a refund has been made (via paypal or from within the amember control panel) or a dispute has been raised. I'm sure the same feature would be useful for other payment plugins.

This way, the amember admin can decide for themselves how this function should work. There have been several occasions where I've issued a refund (sometimes a partial refund) for a product via PayPal, but don't necessarily want to cancel account access... or at least I want to manage it manually in case I need to swap in one product for another, say.