My friend’s dad is a citizen of a country other than Croatia. He’s got a credit card and my friend used it to open a PayPal account because it’s not possible to open one if you’re a citizen of Croatia (and that sucks big time). For a couple of years all worked well. Until this very day, when PayPal decided to display the following message:

Error 3028. You have been accessing your account from a sanctioned country. Per international sanctions regulations, you are not authorized to access the PayPal system. For more information about your PayPal account status, contact ofacappeal@paypal.com. For further information regarding international sanctions, please refer to the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control at www.treas.gov/ofac, or to the UK Bank of England at www.bankofengland.co.uk/sanctions.

Now, I don’t understand a damn thing I’ve read on the OFAC site, and the other link points to a non-existent page. Could it be that what they’re trying to tell us is something in the lines of: “We don’t care what country you’re a citizen of, but you are currently in a sanctioned country and you cannot use the PayPal system. Yes, we understand that you could very well be there on a vacation, but, again, we really don’t care.”?

What’s worse, it seems that the account stays unaccessible until you contact them by e-mail and try to clear things up. Because, you know, a terrorist could be trying to access your account illegaly and that is very bad. Terrorists are everywhere and they want to harm everyone. Well fuck you PayPal, I’ve survived without you before, I surely can live without you in the future.

I wonder, why doesn’t Amazon block my account when I try to buy something using my Croatian credit card?

Maybe I’m wrong and the problem lies in fact that a member of Al-Qa’ida had actually tried to hack into my friends account and Paypal just wants to protect him. But I guess the message then wouldn’t say “You have been accessing your account…” but “Someone has been accessing your account…”.

And all I wanted was a fracking Flickr account :(