It's amazing that companies still can't handle the concept of somebody moving to a different country but still using a credit card from their original country.

I spent two days on the phone with Microsoft last year trying to find a way to pay them $700 to renew my lapsed Visual Studio subscription. I live in France and want to pay with a US card (or UK card or even a French card at this point), but because of some combination of physical location, store location, account location, card country, and vpn that I had on the first time I tried the process, the system is in a state where it can never again process a payment for me.

There are like 5 or 6 companies where I'm in this state. You get exactly one try to guess the magic combination of all those things above to get the backend to sail you through smoothly. If you blow it, it'll write everything down and refuse to let you change anything, then drop you into an infinite loop telling you to just change [store|country|card country|hairstyle] and sending you back to the beginning.

I mean sure, it's probably saving me a couple grand a year in services that I wish I could get working. But it baffles me that those companies don't want that money for themselves.

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gpjt 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

In the EU, at least one of the problems is regulatory/tax for digital services. They need to charge you the VAT rate for the country where you are based. For that, they need two pieces of evidence about your location. There are various things they can use for that -- telephone number, IP address, card billing address, and so on. If they can collect two that indicate the same country, they're safe -- but if all of them point in different directions then they could get in trouble during a tax audit.

Of course, for larger transactions you'd expect that a human in the loop could work with you to get the right info so that they would be covered. But I guess for Microsoft, their definition of "larger" might be more than a few grand...

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arprocter 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Went through similar with my PlayStation account about a decade ago - couldn't figure out how to switch it from a UK card to a US one

Tried a few things, but eventually just gave up and opened a new account (fortunately I hadn't made many purchases)

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grebc 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Unless you’re on vacation what reason is there for your IP to be on a separate continent to the billing address attached to a credit card? From the POV of all the people in the payment processing chain.

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jasonkester 3 days ago | parent [-]

Because people move to different countries.

There's no way to update the billing address of my US bank to a foreign address. My UK bank is in the address of my house there. My French bank is in the address of my house here.

As I said, you get one and only one guess as to how the company in question wants to handle this. I want to buy Minecraft for my kid's birthday. Do I buy it from the US store with my US card because that's where I lived when I set up my Microsoft account? Do I buy it in the French store with my French card (with that US Microsoft account)?

Answer: Both of those will get you permanently banned from buying Minecraft on that account. There's a Secret Third Answer, but there's no way of knowing it in advance (or even after the fact since there is no functional customer support that knows about this issue).

	▲	grebc 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I’d not want to be responsible for the KYC/AML checks on your transactions. Banks go out of their way for HNW individuals, which it sounds like you are with 3 seperate residences in 3 different countries, I’d check to see if you qualify.