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Comment by ma2rten | Hacker News Reader

I have an upcoming trip to Europe, which I am quite excited about. I wanted to set up a Tailscale exit node to ensure that critical apps I depend on, such as banking portals continue working from outside the country.

I've never had an issue accessing banking portals from Europe.

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Just because you didn't, it doesn't mean us others don't get "flagged for fraud" and banned when trying to do something remotely.

I wonder if trying to account for that would make you look even more risky/fraudulent. Eg you access the bank portal from a US address but at similar time you physically use the card in Europe.

Not quite banking portals, but I've had banking apps of a South American country that were only available for Play Store accounts of that country. Really annoying, and even with VPN/proxy/Tailscale it's not easily fixable as you can only change the country of a play store account once every 12 months.

Yes, many (smaller) banks only allow play/app store access to the countries they operate in (really annoying for expats!).

But that won't affect you if you're just travelling. Even if you get a new phone, your account is still set to your original country.

I've done some work in this area with large american banks (around a decade ago, so it might have changed!) and generally the only problem you could have is if you were abroad and using a new device – you wouldn't get locked out but it might trigger some extra verification steps

Yes, this is still a thing. Last year I installed Linux on an old laptop to use while traveling in SE Asia. Had problems with TD Bank because of this, complicated by my account needing SMS to the US number for the extra verification.

My credit union seems to blanket ban European IP addresses. You basically get an nginx 403 page if you try to access their site from anywhere that isn’t the US. It’s dumb but I like their other services so I make due with a vpn when I’m in Europe

I'm gonna assume they actually meant streaming services, not banks.

Why would you assume that? Especially since they said... the exact opposite.

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