PayPal seems to be one of those services people either love or hate. While eBay stock has plummeted some 43% since January, PayPal is up and slated to hit one billion dollars by year end. This shouldn’t be a huge surprise as people are tired of ridiculous bank fees. Been to an ATM lately? $2.00 to draw out $20? What is that, like 10% for a completely automated computer exchange? Bank fees blow.

PayPal Spreads Its Wings:

PayPal is knocking elbows with Visa, MasterCard, and the banks that issue their cards. It just passed American Express, the leading bank card issuer. PayPal now has 72 million worldwide accounts, compared with AmEx’s 65 million. Yet that pales next to card associations Visa International and MasterCard International Inc., with 1 billion and 680 million cardholders, respectively. Likewise, PayPal’s $19 billion in total payment volume last year falls far short of Visa’s $3 trillion from all of its member banks.

Passed American Express? That’s pretty impressive.

But the PayPal story isn’t all rosey. Phishing scams plague customers of the service and back in the end of January a partner exposed an undisclosed number of e-mails.

Also, PayPal turned their back on adult entertainment ventures online. At one time they courted the adult entertainment industry, showing up an industry events and trying to woo business from adult vendors. This business, morally outraged detractors aside, accounts for a huge amount of revenue online but then somewhat abruptly after the sale to eBay PayPal ceased offering services to online adult vendors. This is not completely in line with Visa and Mastercard who still do business with adult entertainment online, begrudgingly it seems. Online casinos were taken to the woodshed (no more processing) by Visa and MC and PayPal already as well.

And then there are online consumer watchdog sites like paypalsucks.com which describes itself as “an anti paypal site to expose the nightmare of doing business ‘the paypal way.’”

• Mastercard #1 for first time in 25 years, VISA #2
• Revisiting the Paypal Virtual Mastercard, er, now PayPal Secure Card?
• Teens with Visa cards online
• 4 million PayPass cards by year end, plans MasterCard
• Wallet envy: GBuy vs. PayPal?
• Why is eBay unwilling to offer Google Checkout?