PayPal Users Massively Overcharged for Mac OS X Lion

Some Apple users that paid for their OS X Lion upgrades via PayPal have been charged thousands of dollars by accident.

It seems a little blunder has seen customers buying Apple's latest OS X update charged more than once for their purchase. Unfortunately for users stuck on the receiving end of this mistake, neither Apple nor PayPal appears to be owning up to the mistake.

MacRumors reports that John Christman purchased OS X Lion on July 23, and paid $31.79 after sales tax. His PayPal account was then charged an additional 121 times, for a grand total of $3,878.40. However, when he contacted both Apple and PayPal, each pointed the finger of blame at the other. He's not alone, either. MacRumors points to a discussion thread on Apple's support pages that is filled with people that experienced something similar.

"I purchsed OS X Lion from the app store and now paypal statement shows that itunes store charged me 20 times more, a total of $599.80," user Abhas writes. "Please help, what am I supposed to do. I already talked with paypal and they said they will look and I emailed apple customer service, no reply yet."

Abhas includes a screenshot that shows each additional iTunes charge.

Another user said that though Apple has refunded the extra charges, they will still have to wait a few days for refunds to be lodged with their bank.

"All the charges ended up in my bank account today and overdrafted it and incurred fees," writes Teknikks. "Now have to wait days for the refunds to take effect and more days to put them back in my bank account," he continued. "App Store agents have told me this is now a known issue and Apple is investigating the specific causes.  So far they can only blame an overload in their automated payment system from all the Lion downloads..."

While Apple is blaming an overloaded payment system, there are other theories. John Christman, the user that was charged 121 times, believes it might have something to do with Apple's iCloud feature that allows iTunes to automatically download previous purchases. 

"I fresh installed Lion, because the upgrade caused a lot of problems. My system needed as fresh start anyway," he told MacRumors. "I logged into our developer account and got the latest iTunes Beta, and installed it. iTunes has a cool new feature to download all your purchased apps for you.
I clicked download all," he continued, adding, "As each download started it charged me $31.79. Some apps came fast, some took longer, but the timing was directly related to when a new app started to download."

Christman says that though the items say 'refunded' in his account, this isn't the case.

"Apple claims there was only one transaction. When I told PayPal to dispute them, they closed the cases and marked the items as refunded on the 23rd. Bear in mind all this money was taken and never returned yet."

Have you had issues with being charged multiple times for OS X Lion? Let us know your story in the comments below!