Something very similar happened to me with Amazon. I used a new debit card from an online bank to purchase an expensive item and deliver it to a foreign address (which is admittedly suspicious). The payment bounced, Amazon immediately locked my account and requested to see a card billing statement sent to my home address to reactivate it. Upon login I am presented with a stern request for documentation, a pdf upload field, a tweet-sized text field for comments, and all communication comes from a [email protected] address. All my kindle/audible/etc media immediately became inaccessible.

I went through every possible channel to explain that the card does not send me a billing statement and I cannot possibly produce one, requesting to be called or at least emailed by a human, to no avail. After spending tens of thousands of dollars on Amazon over the course of fifteen years I couldn't even get a personal call from the case manager, and all my purchased media is gone.

To this day I have found no resolution, and the only next step is to contact them through a lawyer.

My country of nationality, residence, and issuing bank are all different. On top of that, my name is odd for my place of residence and contains characters outside of A-Z (which makes names not match 100% on cards)

I get hit hard by anti-fraud systems.

If I budget 1-2h for any given online purchase, I have <50% success rate with Paypal and ~75% with Stripe. If I contact the bank and merchant, the issue is always with the payment processor. Trying to resolve through the payment processor goes nowhere. The only thing that can work is try again with another of my 6 legit cards (mix of visa/Mac debit/credit) and if I’m lucky it goes through. Sometimes the next day; I guess some cool down is in place.

This feels like discrimination or xenophobia with extra steps. If you’re international enough and have some bad luck, the systems will perceive you just like a scammer and will deny you service or require hours of intervention because of things like your name, location history, and nationality. (For those who haven’t noticed, sometimes PayPal will arbitrarily require you to create an account in order to complete a single payment. Nationality is required information in this step)

If it’s not something I really want provided only by a single seller, I will nowadays abort at merchants only accepting PayPal, and at the first failure of Stripe. It’s not worth the headache.

This reminds me... what about those who do not have a surname?

> Most Afghans have no surname; it is also common to have no surname in Bhutan, Indonesia, Myanmar, and the south of India.

They cannot handle patronyms, and for many people every local document (except passport and tax card) uses initials, for example. The problem is that the bank account name has initials (in many places for many people) which does not match your name.

My friend had an issue with Wise because they wanted the name to match that is on the passport, which was fine because it did. Then it started demanding that it matches his bank account name, which it cannot, because he has only initials there.

They are dealing with international customers. They need to understand these differences, but they do not.

I knew a guy with a single-character first name. He once bought an airline ticket but then got stuck at TSA who would not let him pass, despite all his ID etc saying the same thing.

A large number of web sites would not let him register at all.

Here is a list: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood