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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

No need to go looking for conspiracy theories. The reason they don't do this is simple: It's hard.

Look around at the plethora of ways to accept payment and send money online. Dozens of them, right? How many of them allow payouts to non-US citizens? One.

PayPal, that's it. That's the only company that's managed to even partially solve the horrible problem of how to put money into a non-US bank account and not immediately go out of business due to fraud. They solved this because solving fraud issues is the only thing they do. And it took them a long time. And still they can't figure out how to do it for over half the countries in the world.

Google doesn't hate Hungarians. They just don't know how to send you money. Try not to hold it against them.

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I don't understand why paying me money is a problem, and I don't get it what kind of fraud are we speaking about. Normally the following should happen: 1.I create an account on their site with my username and password. I log in with this account. 2. I upload the contents (game). 3. Logged in with this account I could: a.: specify my PayPal account to thich I expect the money to be transfered. b.: specify my international bank account number (SWIFT code)

How can be there fraud? If I specify someone else's bank account number then only I can lose on that. I cannot imagine how could I do any 'fraud'. This is beyond me.

Edit: It is quite absurd. We have a global economy in which it is easy for the money to flow in one direction but very hard (or sometimes impossible) to flow in the other.

There are also legal ramifications when doing business in a new country.

They (Google, in this case) have to ensure that they are complying with appropriate company/tax/accounting/privacy/etc. laws for each country. This may not be as easy as rubber-stamping some forms, so they have to prioritise countries they are familiar with and are can already do business in.

Google hasn't even managed to accept Canadian developers into the Android marketplace, despite having multiple operations there - they either aren't trying very hard, or they are just really, astonishingly bad at this stuff.

Stealing credit card numbers, creating accounts with those CC#s, and using purchases to drain them into your account is the first thing that comes to mind, though it's probably only one possibility.

That's the absurdity of the whole situation! Let's say I've stolen someone's credit card number.

If I am a game producer, and I specify this credit card as the destination of the money I earned, then I only make the card owner a favor!

On the other hand if I buy games using this credit card I cause harm to the credit card owner.

Still, they happily allow you to be a consumer but not a producer.

No, the idea is you use stolen credit cards to buy your own game, then you get the money from the credit cards to yourself perhaps easier than other ways. I'm not sure.

Heh, consider yourself lucky, in Costa Rica you can't even buy from the Android Market, or Amazon mp3 store. Hell, I had to use a US vpn just to be able to buy my phone. I know it's probably a negligible piece of market share but it sucks to feel excluded.

I think the problem is when cross border fraud happens, the complexity and cost for detective work is higher than domestic fraud. Also in case of regular refund for customers, it is much easier for Market institution to deduct fund from domestic sellers' accounts. While cross border market has to deal with tax, exchange rate and different countries law regarding for refund.

> PayPal, that's it.

Doesn't Moneybookers work too?

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