Buying HL - Well, this is awkward...

[Mathias]

It won't help for the additional packages, but the main program is available on CD - have you checked any internet retailers that will charge you in Australian Dollars, and see if they have copies for sale?

[TemporalVengeance]

Originally Posted by Fox Lee

I had another idea! I know you can buy Visa "cift cards" that are pre-loaded with a certain amount of money, and are supposedly accepted wherever real Visa cards are (and I think they advertise them for travel, so they must be okay for international stuff). I can't imagine there could be any bank fees associated with that.

Rob, would you have any way of knowing whether you processed an order made with such a card? I'd like to make sure it would work, but I'm guessing there's no way for the seller to tell if a card is pre-paid or not ^^;

That will indeed work. For reasons unknown, even though my debit card used to work on Lone Wolf's store, I've suddenly started to get the error message that my bank doesn't use verification codes (even though there's one on the back of the card and it worked before). To solve this, I snagged a pre-paid visa gift card and I've been reloading it and buying the packages that way.

[rob]

We've had a few people run into problems with the gift cards, but they generally seem to work. The problems all center on whether the issuing bank properly performs security verification on the cards.

Since we sell electronically, we have to be proactive against fraud, and we rely entirely on the bank issuing the card for our fraud detection. When a charge is submitted, we send everything to the bank that issues the card. The bank then is responsible for telling us whether all the security details match. Unfortunately, some banks only do partial checks, and some banks do no checking at all. The bank tells us what was actually checked, so we know if the bank doesn't do full checking.

If we were shipping physical products, we could safely get away with a partial match - that's what most companies who ship you products do. However, we deliver electronically, so the prospect of fraud is much higher. We tried allowing partial matches many years ago and had lots of fraud problems, so we had to switch to full verification, even though some banks don't support it. And with the continued acquiring of smaller banks by bigger banks, cards that used to work will stop working for awhile until everything gets completely switched over to the new bank.

Hope this explanation helps...

[Fox Lee]

Super helpful! Thanks Rob and TemporalVengeance I picked up a pre-paid card today, so hopefully this will be the end of my problems.

EDIT: Well, there we go So a pre-paid MasterCard worked just fine. There was still an extra charge for the international seller, but it was only 2.5% of the AU$ value, so less than 75c. Admittedly there was a $2.95 charge for the temp card itself, but still, I came out way ahead of where I would have been.

I'm really grateful for the help, folks

[TemporalVengeance]

Originally Posted by Fox Lee

Super helpful! Thanks Rob and TemporalVengeance I picked up a pre-paid card today, so hopefully this will be the end of my problems.

EDIT: Well, there we go So a pre-paid MasterCard worked just fine. There was still an extra charge for the international seller, but it was only 2.5% of the AU$ value, so less than 75c. Admittedly there was a $2.95 charge for the temp card itself, but still, I came out way ahead of where I would have been.

I'm really grateful for the help, folks

Always happy to help fellow gamers!