on Apr 3rd, 2007
Paypal is No Bosnia’s Pal
While cleaning up my emails the other day, I found a year-old email message from Paypal:
Error 3028. You have been accessing your account from a sanctioned country. Per international sanctions regulations, you are not authorized to access the PayPal system. For more information about your PayPal account status, contact ….
What happened was I applied for a freelance online gig with an American employer. He asked if he could pay me through Paypal. This was when I discovered I could not access my existing account from Sarajevo. So I wrote an email to Paypal asking them to explain what was going on and got this reply:
PayPal is aware that Bosnia & Herzegovina in itself is not an OFAC sanctioned country. Currently, there are trading and transaction restrictions of: persons engaged in, assisting, sponsoring, or supporting internal stabilization efforts in the Western Balkans. The Western Balkans consists of the following countries: Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Albania, Macedonia and Serbia and Montenegro. At this time, PayPal does not provide service to the above listed countries. Due to excessive risk, PayPal has made the business decision to block all account logins from this region.
(However, the last time I checked, Croatia was added to the list of Paypal country, but with some restriction.)
What happened was I applied for a freelance online gig with an American employer. He asked if he could pay me through Paypal. This was when I discovered I could not access to my existing account from Sarajevo.
Prior to this incident, I did not seriously think about the political and economical status of Bosnia. I am not a business or political analyst, but I think this incident tells a lot about the vulnerability and instability of Bosnia.
Read on if you have not heard of Paypal or do not understand why I make such a big fuss about having a Paypal account.
What is Paypal? - PayPal is an account-based system which that allows you to use your email addresses to send and receive money.
How does it work? - You sign up for an account, supply an email address, credit card and bank information. This registered email is the one you use to send and receive money.
What are the rules and catches? - You send and receive money completely for free with a personal account. However, your senders have fewer payment options to send you the money. When you upgrade to a business account, you still send money for free, but are charge from 1.9% - 2.9% plus $0.30 per received payment, regardless of how your senders fund their payment. (Please go to website to see the current rates.) With a personal account, Paypal charges you 4.9% + $0.30 USD (limit of 5 transactions per 12 month period) or 4.9% plus $0.30 USD for card payments received using PayPal on Skype.
Why should you use Paypal? - To simplify your online business transaction. It is fast and convenient to receive money without the stress of supplying your sensitive banking information. Many online revenue networks choose Paypal as their payment options, and some have lower minimum-payout if they can pay through Paypal than by issuing a check.
Examples of how you can use Paypal
- Pay and receive money for eBay’s items.
- Pay for purchase from an online store you don’t feel secured enough to give out your credit card’s information.
- Pay for and receive money from services/companies/people which only deal with Paypal.
- Pay off a friend for eating at his party.
I’ve done all the above.
Paypal is available to users from more than a hundred countries. To those who are reading this article, chance are Paypal is acceptable in your country. But it is worth double -checking before you sign on for any Paypal-related service as you don’t want my Paypal experience in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Sign up for a PayPal account or read more about it.
Tags: BeyondSarajevo, sarajevo, bosnia, paypal, balkan
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