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"I've been getting this error since two weeks, I can't login to my account, I can't pay for my bills, I can't withdraw money, nothing," complains one affected user, taichisan, on the Ebay support forum.

"I'm from Germany and I've had the same problems for about 1-2 weeks. I tried calling the customer support hotline 4-5 times - it costs 14 cents per minute!" echoes another user called CuteKaori22 on the PayPal Developer Community forums<

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The complaints date back to the end of September, but many customers are yet to have their problems resolved by PayPal's technical support team.

"We are actively looking for the root cause," says a PayPal developer, PayPal_FrankIb on the Developer's forum, admitting that the error messages were, in some cases, caused by a change in the default currency registered on an account.

This is not the first time that users have faced the prospect of being locked out of their accounts. In April this year the company announced that various "insecure browsers" would be banned from accessing the site in order to prevent phishing attacks.

Another security issue in May this year caused the loss of thousands of dollars of revenue for some users, as international payments temporarily stopped working.

"We have already lost thousands of dollars," claimed a post on the Clicky blog at the time, a web startup which was affected by the bug, "and we are not happy."

PayPal was unable to comment on the problems encountered by users at the time of writing.