Hello,
I am a user of PayPal from Greece and I have been using PayPal as a payment method for the last 15 years.
Since Capital Controls were enforced in Greece at the end of June 2015, paying for goods or services, either within Greece or abroad was initially restricted completely.
After a few weeks and after a lot of complaints from users and Debit/Credit Card holders and mainly Debit/Credit Card issuers (i.e. Visa, Mastercard etc.) some of the restrictions were lifted. The main reason was that Greek Government was so stupid that enforced Capital Controls on foreign economic organizations/companies such as Visa and MasterCard, with absolutely no right whatsoever. These organizations/companies saw that they has suddenly no transactions at all from their Greece users outside Greece...! This is when they realized that The Bank of Greece has forbidden all cards that were issued from Greece banks (either state owned or privately owned banks) to froze their transactions made to purchase good/services from outside Greece via electronic methods (i.e. internet purchase, PayPal, etc) or while the cards where used at a POS in another country outside Greece. These organizations/companies threatened Greece with lawsuits and millions (or even billions) as losses from earnings since the "logo" of 'VISA' or 'MASTERCARD' (and all other credit cards i.e. Diners, AmEx etc) are not Greek owned, based, statutory, established etc..
Therefore, the initial limitations/restrictions where lifted and Credit/Debit cards started to work while the "body" of the card was
physically abroad and swiped in a POS abroad, as well as when used for "SOME" transactions.
I state "some" transactions, because from my own experience I have seen that I can use my two cards (one Visa credit cards and one MasterCard debit card) which are associated/linked with my PayPal account to make SOME but NOT ALL the transactions through internet eshops, ebay. amazon etc.
To be more specific, when checking out and paying through PayPal, I choose not to pay using my PayPal account balance, but by choosing the link that states "Pay with my credit or debit card".
Sometimes after I enter my Credit/Debit Card details the transaction is completed, but sometimes I get the following message:
"The card you entered cannot be used for this payment. Please enter a different credit or debit card number."
To be more specific, when buying car parts, 9 out of 10 time the transactions are successful, but trying to purchase a case for a mobile phone worth US$ 5 , the transaction was rejected.
In this respect, and since I haven't had any luck with the Customer Support of PayPal, since they don't have the slightest idea of what is happening in Greece (and why should they care, to tell you the truth...!), please provide a reasonable explanation to my issue of having only a few selected categories of goods (i.e. car parts) that are allowed to be paid with a Greek issued Credit/Debit Card and most of the other categories of goods and even website databases that require subscriptions are not allowed to be paid with a Greek issued Credit/Debit Card.
Thank you very much for taking the time to read my query and thank you for replying!
