How To Verify Your PayPal Account Without A Credit Card

PayPal is a popular payment processing system that is used by millions to make purchases and transactions on the Internet. Much of PayPal’s appeal stems from the fact that its system supports user to user transactions.

New PayPal accounts are limited automatically until they are verified. Limitations block certain site features and limits the amount of money that unverified PayPal users can transfer to other PayPal users or withdraw to a bank account.

Accounts can be verified either by adding and confirming a bank account or credit card. Both verification options may not be available in all countries. (You can use this page on the PayPal site for additional information on the process for select countries)

To verify a PayPal account click on the Get Verified link underneath the welcome message on the start page.

You then have the option to verify the PayPal account either by Credit Card or by bank account.

Verify PayPal by bank account

If you select the bank account verification option you are asked to enter the account information in the verification form. PayPal will make two small payments to the account in the next business days which you need to confirm once they are listed in the account statement. Just visit the PayPal website again to complete the verification.

Verify PayPal by credit card

PayPal will withdraw a small amount of money from the credit card as part of the card’s verification. The company will refund the money to the PayPal account after the verification. Verifying by credit card is usually faster than verifying by bank account.

Verify PayPal by virtual credit card

What can you do if you cannot verify by bank account or credit card? You could create a virtual credit card and use that card to get the account verified. Services like EntroPay offer virtual credit cards. This comes as a price though, as many services require you to deposit money into the virtual credit card account and charge you for that.

As far as EntroPay is concerned; The service does not charge for the account or the creation of the virtual Visa card. It does however charge for loading a credit card, exchange fees and money that’s transferred to the card.

Please note that EntroPay accounts need to be verified as well.

Closing Words

It also needs to be noted that the initial account limitation is different from other PayPal account limitations. There are a number of reasons why PayPal limits account, a common one being unusual account activity.

Using a virtual credit card to verify an account should work for users from all over the world. Please note that you may still run into troubles when withdrawing money from PayPal (To be honest, I’m not 100% certain that you can withdraw money to a credit card. You may need a bank account for that after all.).

The credit card is on the other hand useful to get the account verified and to fund money. Plus, you can limit automatic withdrawals to a specific sum of money.

Have you had troubles getting your PayPal account verified? Let me know in the comments.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Need To Enter A Valid Credit Card? Try This

Some websites or services let you sign up only if you enter a valid credit card. This can happen even if you have no intention of ever buying something from the service or website. Sometimes you may prefer not to enter your own credit card information on the Internet, and sometimes you do not have a valid credit card that is accepted in another country.

What other options do you have? You could try and get a virtual credit card, either from a bank that is offering those cards or an online service such as Entropay. The first may work fine and without lots of administration, the second can be quite the hassle to setup and maintain. Plus, it can happen that virtual credit cards won’t be accepted by the service or website, in which case you are still not able to complete the sign up process.

An alternative to this are test credit card account numbers. They are not linked to any accounts or names. PayPal has a public page with test credit card account numbers available where you find credit card numbers for major companies such as American Express, Mastercard, Visa or Discover.

The expiration date can be freely selected, the only requirement is that it needs to be a data in the future in mmyy format.

The credit cards cannot be used to make purchases. What they can be used for however are services that require you to enter a credit card either during signup or for specific services they offer. One example would be Amazon’s AppStore service which requires you to enter a valid credit card account number to download the free apps that it provides on a daily basis.

It is likely that at least some sites and companies have banned those credit card numbers from being used on their sites. You’ll probably be surprised that they will work on a lot of sites on the other hand.

Disclaimer: Please note that companies or organizations may see it as fraud if you are using credit card information that are not your own. Neither ghacks nor the author of this article are responsible if this happens.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Visa, MasterCard Plan to link Credit Card Purchases And Online Marketing

If you thought it could not get worse with all the tracking and personalization on the Internet, then you have just been proven wrong. According to The Wall Street Journal and other sources, both Visa and MasterCard are planning to tie credit card purchases with personalized online advertisement. What does it mean? You recently bought a new BMW? Expect to see car insurance ads! You are a regular customer at Mc Donalds, Burger King or Kentucky Fried Chicken? Expect weight loss ads to dominate your ad experience on the Internet. Paid your membership to that online dating site with your credit card? See mail order bride ads.

Linking “real-world” purchases to online users is one of the holy grails of Internet marketing. Current advertising companies are already able to link online activity to advertisements. Linking offline purchases on the other hand would push behavioral targeting to another level.

Both credit card companies interestingly enough confirmed that they are exploring ways of using transactional data for targeted online advertisements. A Visa patent application in April for instance revealed plans to use personal details to create online profiles for ad targeting, with personal details taken from a variety of sources including “information from social network websites, information from credit bureaus, information from search engines, information about insurance claims, information from DNA databanks”.

A Master Card spokesman stated that the company “doesn’t collect card-holders’ names or contact information in transactions it processes”, and that it therefor “doesn’t connect an individual’s Web-surfing activity to their specific cardholder transaction data or provide outside companies with individuals’ transaction data”.

According to the Wall Street Journal article, both companies said that the plans are preliminary. Master Card and Visa are not the only two credit card processing companies that use the billions of credit card transactions for marketing. Most companies disclose in their privacy policies that they may share personal information with third party companies.

Master Card credit card holders can opt-opt of a variety of marketing and tracking related programs. This includes opting-out from the anonymization of personal information to perform data analyzes and from a unique web analytics cookie to avoid the aggregation and analysis of data collected.

The best way to protect yourself? Pay with cash whenever possible. What’s your take on this?

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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