Update, Amazon basically said they won't accept to remove the hold on my account, saying:
> The information you supplied was reviewed by Amazon but we cannot remove the hold on your account at this time. For details, check for an email or text message from Amazon describing next steps. Please contact us for further concerns.
I provided my visa + passport + card pic + selfie + Screens of latest Gift card order (email and from the website), still they won't remove the hold and effectively stealing the money in the account. I can't believe this is being done in good faith, this is clear theft, because what else they need?
Update 2:
I received an email with very dismissal tone from amazon telling me the account will be closed. The funds are still there, I'm planning to apply for consumer complain against them, I'm willing to go to the end with this.
Yes, PayPal once locked me from reading their developer docs because I opened it from the wrong country. These guys never heard of remote working apparently?
1- The issue is rarely from the debit card it's always accepted, most of the times the payment will be cancelled from the service provider side
2- It's not technically non-Indian account, I'm opening accounts using valid Indian mobile number (tied to my visa and a real address), I always disclose that I'm not Indian when needed.
3- I was even trying to open Indian bank account to transfer money but no success so far (while possible in theory as I understood).
There are legitimate reasons for not wiring money if that was even an option, because you don't pay the hospital large amount ahead, and when it's time there's not enough time to wire the money.
Ah sorry, it was hard to understand what types of transactions you were talking about. Yes, the reality is that when you try to live in a foreign country and do non-touristy "resident" things like buy things online or pay bills, but when you don't actually have a work visa that allows you to open a local bank account -- the systems aren't built for that. And local merchants really do put themselves at the risk of scams -- even with debit cards, transactions can be reversed by banks (stolen debit cards are a thing), and then the merchant is out of merchandise and money. It sucks, and you just wind up having to rely on a friend or family member to do your online purchases. It's such a small group of people, that companies don't do much to support those edge cases.
I still don't understand why you couldn't wire money though. That's what wiring money internationally is for. If timing with the hospital is an issue, you just wire yourself or your family member in advance -- that's usually more common than attempting to a the hospital directly. (And even if you do have to wire the hospital directly, you can provide proof of the fact that the wire was initiated from your bank.) The only problem I can think of with wiring money is the fact that the money is illegal or someone is trying to evade taxes or something. If the money is perfectly legal, then what is the problem?
> because you don't pay the hospital large amount ahead, and when it's time there's not enough time to wire the money.
This was their justification against wire transfers. Obviously I don't know how the accounts receivable department works in Indian hospitals because I've never been to India let alone a hospital there, but this strikes me as unusual. A couple days delay to pay large sums of money seems more than reasonable.
wiring money via international accounts is instantaneous, last time I had wired money to me (last week). Or at least within an hour or two. The issue here, probably, is that there is usually a fairly large fee attached to it from the receiving bank. My bank, it's 25 bucks, flat rate. Each and every wire, even if it is 5 bucks being wired.
I'll take your word for it, a glance at google told me a wire transfer from a foreign bank will typically take about 2 days to clear, but I've only ever done wire transfers domestically. But yeah, a $25 fee might be the hold up, except if I'm understanding the OP, the wire transfer would be for costly medical care. Typically if I'm looking at paying a large bill, the bill blinds me from the pain of being nickel and dimed on fees. So I think we're probably not talking about paying $5 at 7-11.
It’s India. The land of the thrifty, always looking for a deal (cultural stereotype). It’s the reason so many US companies have a hard time breaking into that market though.
My boss and I spent several weeks in India talking to people and learning the cultural basics just to figure out how to price our products. If you want to sell there, you need extremely competitive pricing with discounts, in a very price-sensitive market. Like, if you know the coupon culture in the US, it’s like that times 100.
A few years ago, gift cards are THE currency in scamming world for shifting funds between victim and money launderer. They would ask victim to go to 8 different department stores to buy as many gift cards as the store allows then tell them the card number. It's pretty normal the victim hands them over 20 $200 gift cards. And the scammers will keep phishing the victim over and over again until there is no more money to squeeze.
Nowadays many scammers switch to digital concurrency like Bitcoin, which is even less traceable and hard to shut down, but that's only because banks and stores have put in the counter-measurements you encounter to combat them.
There are many scamming related materials available online. Many scam-baiters put their video on Youtube, such as Jim Browning [1] and Kitboga [2].
Absolutely. Walmart used to have a policy of refunding gift cards in cash. You'd buy many at one location, and return them at another. Less trackable. Gift cards are also used quite regularly in human/sex trafficking to control the victims.
hmm no, my bank is fine, Amazon customer service told me they won't accept my card, that was the only option, but excuse me, how is 100-200$ gift card is money laundering?
Buying gift cards with stolen credit cards is like fraud/money laundering 101. The amount is not really a differentiator either because a lot of carders will run smaller test transactions to see if the card is still active.
My problem is different, the bank approve my payment after 3D secure check, the offender is the service provider, they cancel the order and issue a refund with a vague statement!
In this case it might actually make it worse. Why are you suddenly, while in the US (for example), ordering physical services in India?
My bank locked my credit card once due to suspected fraud. I asked what triggered it and they said "You never buy gas on this card". This was 15 years ago and I'm sure the algorithms have only gotten better.
A different bank used to ask you to tell them if you were planning on traveling so that your card would continue to work, they stopped doing it and said that they had improved their fraud detection and this was no longer necessary. My guess is that they take the data provided by airlines[0] when you book a flight and use that to tell where and when you're traveling.
My favorite was the time I used my Disney credit card to book a trip to Disney World - flight, hotel, tickets, everything. No problem. Then I get to Disney World and my card gets locked when I try to buy a churro because I used my card in a new location.
Not to mention the number of apps (and increasingly websites) which will require location services. So now you have a GPS location in India, and you're making credit card purchases alternating between USA IP's and India point-of-sale machines (and presumably sometimes Indian IP's for apps/sites that might block USA IP's) throughout the day.
As a fellow world traveler / international worker, I do still think this is wrong-headed on the part of the banks, but it's the current paradigm in which we all operate.
In the past it helped for me to call my banks and let them know I am traveling "for the next year" and to ease up on the fraud protection. But now with more and more layers of fraud protection, it's often not my bank that's the gatekeeper.
It's things like not being able to download a local version of an app, or not being able to get a local payment account (like as in UPI payments in India, I don't know if its hard for foreigners to get that specifically but in other countries it can be very difficult without being integrated into the local payment platforms)
P.S. - Re: location services...I like the catchphrase "Any device you truly own would lie on your behalf. If it won't lie for you, you don't own it." I should be able to tell my iPhone to report my location wherever I damn well want to pretend to be.
My bank has a mode that prevents purchases from merchants more than "100 km from me" ... it turns out the ice cream truck from another city was "more than 100 km from me".
That was entertaining and embarrassing because the machine was returning "insufficient funds" for a $2 ice cream, while I'm scrambling in the app trying to figure out how to turn that shit off.
> The information you supplied was reviewed by Amazon but we cannot remove the hold on your account at this time. For details, check for an email or text message from Amazon describing next steps. Please contact us for further concerns.
I provided my visa + passport + card pic + selfie + Screens of latest Gift card order (email and from the website), still they won't remove the hold and effectively stealing the money in the account. I can't believe this is being done in good faith, this is clear theft, because what else they need?