As an added FYI, it was through using the gift cards that I first found out that PayPal was taking an additional $1.00 for every transaction attempt (successful or failure) that they made and holding it for something like 4-8 days before reversing it.

That meant if you had a $100 debit card you could at best only make a $99 purchase on Paypal with it. If you typed in a number wrong and it was declined and you had to start again - another dollar, so you're down to $98.  Since most people use credit cards, they would never know paypal was holding money off them since I don't think those temporary charges are required to be disclosed to you in your statements.

Paypal would eventually give the $1.00 back, but your $100 purchase, for which you clearly had the money, would have been rejected for an unspecified error and you would never know why unless you started asking a lot of questions.

That is why I stopped using Paypal once I found out about those games they seemed to be playing.

To be fair, I think Paypal has curtailed or eliminated that practice. But it doesn't mean others aren't doing variations of it.