Strange communications error with PayPal

Just updating that I checked our paypal settings for business and main receiver email addresses and for identity token and all are correct. 

Thanks, I just wanted to be clear that our problem is not that Paypal is rejecting the payment, our problem is that Paypal is accepting payment when CBSubs is rejecting the sale.  It would be better for us if our members did not get charged by Paypal when CBSubs is not issuing or renewing subscriptions.  I just wanted to make that totally clear, since this case may be a little unusual.  So I'm wondering if the new Paypal interface, or some option in the current interface, could prevent Paypal from completing their acceptance of our members' money if CBSubs has not returned info to Paypal to confirm that CBSubs is issuing or renewing a membership.

I also checked the IPN details on the transaction that started this thread, it just shows payment completed, no retries.  I can send details if you want, tell me what to redact for security. Thanks!

It's not possible for us to do that. PayPal had already handled the payment at that point. We're then requesting the details of that payment from PayPal to verify its authenticity.

The way these systems work is they just redirect you back to the site with a bunch of data in the POST. We can't blindly accept that data as anyone could then just send a POST to the payment process. It's PayPal's API to verify the payment that's failing with a communication error.

We've yet to track down why this randomly happens, but based off PayPal community forums we're not alone in this happening. I'm just taking a guess at whether the newer API would resolve this or not, but I can't say for certain. What's certain is this doesn't appear to be a CBSubs issue directly, but a PayPal one. If you need a more reliable payment provider you could consider switching to Stripe, which you could accept PayPal through Stripe and Stripe will deal with the communication issues.

Thanks!  Consider this closed, I'll check into Stripe.