Online Credit Card Payment And Thai Ip Address

[buadhai]

I've had two incidents recently where attempts to order products online failed because the credit card authorization software didn't like the fact that an order with a US billing address came from an IP address in Thailand.

I never could straighten out the one order, but managed to get the second approved after corresponding with the online retailer.

Anyone else have this sort of experience?

[lopburi3]

Years ago had it happen but fixed with email. Stop spending your money on line.

Seriously find very little that I need to spend money on these days. But guess when you use a Mac mail order may be required more often.

I do have a US card with my Thai address so you might consider that - but I suspect then they will have some other cause for denial. I had one transaction approved last year only to have it resend ed the next day by accounts department on basis it might be fraud (suspect that was probably ISP related). Made me mad enough to just let it go rather than explain. Life as an expat.

[buadhai]

Years ago had it happen but fixed with email.  Stop spending your money on line.

Seriously find very little that I need to spend money on these days.  But guess when you use a Mac mail order may be required more often.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I don't spend too much on line, but sometimes it can't be avoided. The charge that never got fixed was a payment to my web hosting provider for increased bandwidth. Ended up using PayPal instead.

The one that I did fix was to an online cycling store in the US. I'm having a bike computer sent to Mom's house that I'll pick up when I visit next month.

I may see if my credit card company will add my Thai address as a second billing address. I was able to do that when I lived on Saipan: one card, two billing address; one on Saipan and the other in California. That seemed to satisfy retailers who didn't like a "foreign" billing address.

[Harmonica]

I've had two incidents recently where attempts to order products online failed because the credit card authorization software didn't like the fact that an order with a US billing address came from an IP address in Thailand.

I never could straighten out the one order, but managed to get the second approved after corresponding with the online retailer.

Anyone else have this sort of experience?

Please stand back & have a good, long hard look at your avatar.

You're giving people too much head, sir.

Some of us can handle receiving it only once a day.

Thais on the other hand, are not into that sort of thing!

Hope this helps.

[dave111223]

Just connect via US proxy, then they will just see the IP of the proxy (located in US). There are plenty of free proxies, but if you dont want to use those you can just rent some US webhosting (as cheap as like $.01 per year) and then run your own proxy.

(This will also work for connecting to sites which are banned on the thai ISPs)

[buadhai]

Please stand back & have a good, long hard look at your avatar.

You're giving people too much head, sir.

Some of us can handle receiving it only once a day.

Thais on the other hand, are not into that sort of thing!

Hope this helps.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Sorry, I tried to give it up, but I love it too much.

you can just rent some US webhosting (as cheap as like $.01 per year) and then run your own proxy.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I have a host. Can you point me to some place that explains how to run a proxy server on it?

[autonomous_unit]

[oops, I just realized which forum this was in... maybe a moderator should move it to the Internet/tech forum?]

I like privoxy, which comes by default on some Linux distributions and is easy to enable. Google of privoxy should tell you everything you need to know in order to see if it is readily available for your host(s). It is not only a proxy but also has some pretty robust advertisement and web-annoyance filtering that you can toggle on and off.

There are several steps to doing it nicely:

1. install a proxy somewhere

2. configure your browser to use the proxy instead of a "direct connection"

3. advanced: secure the connection from browser to proxy, to avoid giving proxy service to strangers and having your http traffic visible from here to the proxy host

I use a somewhat elaborate setup now: privoxy on my (Linux) laptop, with the browser configured to talk to the proxy on localhost:8118. I modified the local privoxy to forward all traffic by default to

localhost:8119, except .th websites and thaivisa.com which I let the laptop privoxy handle itself.

These proxies are set to only listen on localhost, e.g. I do not offer proxying service to remote clients.

Then, I use SSH port-forwarding to forward port 8119 to the remote proxy with compression on the SSH stream. This helps a lot w/ textual websites from the US, but images are already pretty well compressed so this might actually slow them down a touch. When I forget to enable this SSH forwarding, my browser just reports connection refused when I try to load pages that should be fetched over the remote proxy. I actually got into this habit while working w/ GPRS in BKK, but it still seems to help w/ True service.

I also changed the privoxy settings to relay on non-standard ports so that my IM client can be forwarded through the SSH connection to the US proxy as well... this requires a little more digging in config files so I won't go into that unless you get that far and want to know more.

Edited August 6, 2005 by autonomous_unit

[cdnvic]

Make certain when it's setup that the proxy's IP doesn't resolve to a hostname with *proxy* in it as some retailers will rejet this as well. Best to have it resolve to a made up yet plausibly dialup looking hostmask.

example;

proxy2.someisp.com <--raises red flags as it looks like you're trying to hide something.

dial-clvd255-555-001-101.someisp.com <-- Looks like a real US hostmask

cv