It has been a while since I ordered and I have forgotten. In what nation is the financial institution that GOG uses to take payment for orders? My bank in the USA will put a hold on any payment to any country outside the USA unless I give them advance notice.

Thanks

It's Cyprus.

Actually iirc (and unless something has changed in past year or so):

1. GOG is Registered in Cyprys.
2. GOG offices are in Polland (Warsaw? They're in same building as CD Project Red iirc)
3. Their payment processer is based in Britain.

First part is probably most problematic as Cyprys has been a apparently source of lot of fraud so plenty of banks around the world blocked transactions in first couple of years or so (and still do on occasion) until GOG established itself and became more widely known.

Sorry Petrell, just repeated your reply because I don't know what I am doing on forum yet. I wanted to say that as late as a year ago I had the same problem; I did not have my bank lift payments to Cyprus in advance and they blocked the transactions. Are you saying this has been fixed and I DON'T need to give my bank advance notice?

Thanks all

The Country code for my GoG transactions on my credit card is Cyrprus. I don't know if this means that the funds go through Cyprus or whether that's just where the company is nominally based - we tend to have fewer problems with payments with UK banks; ours tend to let us pay whoever we want

What I mean that the problem most banks have with GOG is that it's incorporated in Cyprus. Afaik GOG uses UK based payment service provider but your bank will still see that the company the money ultimately goes to is Cyprus based and that rises red flags in your bank due to country's past record (there are lot of topics about this, just search cyprus in General discussion forum).

Quote from Firek: Personally if my bank demanded advance notice on all my foreign transactions (that's ~100 a year), I'd change bank immediately. So no, it's not fixed and GOG can't really do anything about it as it's problem in your banks end (no, gog is not going to move to US just because some US bank does not like any company outside US ;-p).

In many countries there are customs regulations issues to deal with. Also, there are embargoes in force in some countries, most notably the USA with respect to Iran, North Korea and Cuba.

Moreover, many governments impose money laundering prevention regulations upon banks that require them to monitor outgoing transactions for suspected money laundering activity. Cyprus and Switzerland are two of the red-flag countries where banks will often have to review a transaction manually first - their automated systems will usually put the transaction on standby until it can be verified by a human being. That's not specific to the US - Germany and the UK often do it as well.

Differences lie in whether red flags are raised on the basis of the account country alone or whether the beneficiary's address is also in a red flag country.

Thanks all. Don't worry Firek, I am not demanding that GOG transfer to US. I am too poor to order more than 2-3 games a year and it is not too much hassle to notify my bank in advance. I had just forgotten that Cyprus was the country that the bank is going to go nuts over.