It's impossible to sign up for GCP in 2022 (Twitter thread) | Hacker News Reader

It's impossible to sign up for GCP in 2022 (Twitter thread)

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18 pointssixhobbits16 comments

*with a 'wise' card/account. Not saying it's not an issue. Just not heard of that provider.

Wise, (before TransferWise) is a very fast growing payments provider that's popular across Europe and the world. I've used it with no problems to sign up with AWS and many many other services -- we run our entire company off the Wise account and it's never been a problem so far :shrug:

It is however, as they state quite clearly on their website, not a bank, but an e-payments provider which 'does things differently', including as mentioned on the thread, giving it's users bank accounts numbers based in a different country to where they actually live. In theory this shouldn't lead to problems, but in practice it often does.

So I suspect a lot people, seeing this, will roll their eyes and say "whatever, get a real bank account and try again".

> giving it's users bank accounts numbers based in a different country to where they actually live

This is actually not meaningfully different: the 2 countries in question are both EU countries, and as long as you're an EU resident, you can register for a bank account in another country without problems (I know because I've done it with another provider... With a real bank account, btw which provides me the 100000€ guarantee in case that they'd go bust)

Of course, that's not saying that things are always perfectly smooth (I know that some Italian banks have issues to set up standing orders to other EU bank accounts, and the Italian bureaucracy itself expect you to declare and pay taxes just for the privilege of having a bank account elsewhere in the EU)

That's not how that's supposed to work in EU.

Money is money after all, so I definitely do feel your frustration.

See the first 4 digits on a credit card? That's the BIN (Bank Identifier Number), it allows you to know who issued the car. You can tell if it's a gift card, prepaid cards.

If you offer online service where you really need to know who the owner is, you clearly don't want such cards. Imagine someone setup a server offering illegal services, you can't identify the owner if the use such a card.

If you offer metered based services where the user get's billed afterwards per usage, then you also don't want such cards since the person can use more and you won't be able to go after them.

This is why such cards are banned.

This sounds pretty big-brother. People can get services like phone/internet service anonymously. The potential for misuse is not generaly a sustainable argument for restricting access in a free society.

(Besides this, they also tried other payment methods than credit card, like bank payment).

I tried to get gcp to go with my golang stuff. I used PayPal with a debit card and an Amex attached to it. I was instantly banned as well.

So I said fuck it and got the aws equivalent. It's really unfortunate and doesnt inspire confidence in their products/support. No remediation and immediate algorithmic bans is a system that's broken. Its not up to me to try again. Thats on Google.

TLDR: Google doesn’t want prepaid cards for obvious reasons and blocks all cards from that provider, and author keeps trying over and over again expecting different results.

Credit cards are not popular in many parts of the world and many people don't have one. So only accepting CC is a bit stupid.

Accepting Prepaid Cards is stupid in this case, not the other way around.

It's only an issue for them because they won't add a "budget" feature. None of the cloud providers do afaik

I don't know exactly what you mean by "budget" feature, But I think AWS recently added "advanced payments", where you can recharge your account in advance to pay your invoices, though as I understand you still need a CC to sign up (which will be used if you in case go over your budget) which is a shame.

Also I think Vultr supports prepayments (even using cryptocurrency).

EDIT: Oh it looks like you need to add a cc or paypal nevertheless even if you use crypto.

> author keeps trying over and over again expecting different results

Totally not true.

It's a very short thread, so no TLDR should be necessary.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1504739663302602752.html

Honestly, the registration begging is getting out of hand.

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