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@suzpoodles wrote:

All the threads on this topic go round and round in circles.  In truth, no one seems to know the answer right now, including the banks, PayPal and eBay.  All deny knowledge.

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All your bank knows is there is a "pending" payment of £1 - pending meaning the payment is in the pre-authorisation stage - made against your card.

eBay never had your card details to make such a charge as you chose PayPal as the payment method at checkout so eBay are not going to know anything about it.

Therefore PayPal must be making these £1 pre-authorisation charges. As pointed out, PayPal state they do this and in the UK the amount they use for such charges is £1. This is unlikely to be some sort of coincidence.

You could stop it all by not using PayPal in the manner that you do. You could instead use your card to create a PayPal balance of the amount required for the payment then select "PayPal balance" as the funding source when checking out on eBay. Or, you could stop using PayPal for eBay purchases and use your card directly instead which would also give you much better protection should anything ever go wrong with a purchase. 

Anyway...I'll bow out of this thread now.