Currys UK blocked from Thailand

[damole]

I just wanted to check the UK price of something and found currys.co.uk is blocked from Thailand or at least from 3BB fibre and DTAC.

 

 

Last month I was in India and aseasnow.com was blocking my IP address.  Blocking whole countries seems counter productive as people without VPNs might still want to shop whilst they are on holiday for example.

 

 

[ozimoron]

Just guessing but it's more likely that Curry's blocked it, not your ISP. Their motive is to stop fraudulent card purchases from overseas. Pointless imo.

 

edit: didn't read the tiny print.

[soi3eddie]

The screenshot from the OP clearly shows that the website owner blocked the country (TH) via Cloudflare. AFAIK Currys UK do not deliver to Thailand. Therefore no need to show website in that country. As I posted on another thread, as a website owner that does not derive revenue from certain countries, then blocking will stop hackers from trying malicious activities. In OP's case all he has to do is use a UK based VPN to view Currys.co.uk It can also stop fraudulent card purchases though 3DS and address verification stops that nowadays. As a merchant, we can block card transactions from any country already. 

 

[connda]

1 hour ago, damole said:

I just wanted to check the UK price of something and found currys.co.uk is blocked from Thailand or at least from 3BB fibre and DTAC.

It's geo-blocked in the UK.  Easy enough to do if currys.co.uk only want's to deal with customers in the UK.  Some organizations choose not to want Internet traffic from certain regions of the globe or certain third-world countries. 

Use a VPN.  It's accessible in a commonwealth country near you.

 

[proton]

works via VPN of course, just tried it

[Myran]

"Blocking whole countries seems counter productive as people without VPNs might still want to shop whilst they are on holiday for example."

 

It's absolutely productive, otherwise they wouldn't do it. Should they have to endure countless amounts of fraudulent or disruptive behavior originating from a specific country just because a handful of legitimate websites visitors can't be bothered to use a VPN?

 

The world doesn't revolve around you.

[ozimoron]

A possibility is to block bots. A lot of traffic (server load) is generated by bots.

[damole]

https://www.currys.co.uk/techtalk/computing/connectivity/how-to-use-a-vpn-virtual-private-network.html

 

From the above:

"You can access content available in other countries. Fancy seeing the different types of content that your favourite TV and movie streaming service offers overseas? Well, with a VPN you might just be able to do this. Because your location is hidden, you can get around geographic restrictions to stream content from around the world."

[blackcab]

4 hours ago, damole said:

Last month I was in India and aseasnow.com was blocking my IP address.

 

This is because AN used to get constantly hit by spammers using Indian IP addresses, whilst getting almost zero legitimate users from India.

[ignis]

Is the reason I use a few different browsers

 

No problem using Opera browser  currys.co.uk  opens fine

but blocked with that message on Chrome and AVG browsers... use AIS

[VocalNeal]

HomePro US is blocked on my PC. 

[HighPriority]

Why don’t hackers and malicious types use vpn’s ?

[gargamon]

Cloudflare is notorious for indiscriminate blocking website access. Personally I use 3 different browsers to access the net, depending on the site I access. I believe cloudflare has minimum browser characteristics that need to be met before they allow access. Changing browsers will fix this issue. Try the current version of chrome and you should be ok.

[damole]

I orignally started the thread as a minor grumble about accessing a website without using a VPN and I've been using one for almost 15 years.  I know that companies have their reasons to want to block traffic from troublesome IPs though it's interesting how other retailers in the UK like Argos are not blocking Thailand but Currys are.

 

Yesterday I had to buy new insurance for my house in London if all the sites blocked Thailand which none of them did and If I hadn't known that one of the uses of a VPN was to get around that then it would have made things difficult.

 

As most companies are not using geo-blocking it would be interesting to know what causes some to implment it.

 

https://www.raymond.cc/blog/easily-block-visitors-from-a-country-using-htaccess/

https://searchengineland.com/should-you-ban-a-country-from-visiting-your-website-71667