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Comment by smutticus | Hacker News Reader

I bought Minecraft so I guess part of this money is/was mine.

I never understand why people still use Paypal. There are so many horror stories and so many alternatives. Just don't use them.

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This was my initial reaction. I thought about emailing paypal to let them know that I had purchased a product...

...but their contact page wasn't working.

What alternatives?

There's Google Checkout and Amazon Payments, neither of which work outside the US. There's also AlertPay, which is apparently used by IPREDator and which is sometimes used by 7chan. I'm not sure whether I trust them more than PayPal.

Do you mean that you can't register to checkout and amazon as a seller if you are not an US resident? Because as a buyer i've used checkout a lot of times from Italy, same thing should be possible in other european countries.

It works for buyers as long as you have an international card. But to register as a seller a US bank account is a must. Given the new features added to Checkout By Amazon and all the Paypal stories, they might get traction if they remove that "US only" tag. Not sure how easy it is though.

There is also Moneybookers[1], though they aren't free of horror stories either.

[1]http://www.moneybookers.com

When I asked, that was kind of my point: There are alternatives, but nothing that works internationally except places that we don't have any reason to expect to be more reliable than paypal is(n't).

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