amuck-landowner

Should service providers be able to refuse service based on country?

TierNet

Member
Verified Provider
It completely depends on the company, if they find many spammers or abusers from a particular country or hit-n-run cases, then they should probably not offer service to those particular countries.
 

KuJoe

Well-Known Member
Verified Provider
Providers should be able to run their company however they want. Nobody comes into your house and tells you how to fold your laundry or how to cook your steak, it's nobody else's business how you handle your business. Whether it's right or wrong is not and should not be a factor because the market will determine how well they do based on their own decisions and as consumers we all have the power to choose how we spend our money.

In short:

Business should have the right to choose how they run their company.

Consumers should have the right to choose how and where they spend their money.
 

raindog308

vpsBoard Premium Member
Moderator
Private businesses yes, but using many of those reasons as the sole basis to not provide service to a customer could earn a private business a lawsuit and/or government fines for violating various local, state, and Federal laws.  The Federal Civil Rights Act covers "folks of different colors" and the Americans with Disabilities Act covers "those who appear to be crazy", and on the state level California's Unruh Civil Rights Act covers "gay folks" (and several other states have similar laws).
I'm pretty sure those laws only apply within the borders of the US.  I'm not even sure they additionally apply to US-based companies doing business elsewhere...i.e., I don't think a woman in Saudi Arabia can sue Microsoft for gender discrimination under US law if they don't hire her.  By the same token, countries that have more stringent laws would apply them to local hiring, service, etc.

The more I think about this, I'm pretty sure you can deny based on country simply by saying you don't serve that market.  A business is under no obligation to serve all countries - you can simply say you lack the expertise (linguistics, culture, etc.) for that market and have made the decision not to accept orders from country X.

Disclaimer: IANAL.

And @drmike, what's with the anti-Semitic bullshit?  You're quoting one man who was not an elected leader of Israel, shooting his mouth off 40 years ago.  I can find you lots of kooks to quote if you want to start bashing entire ethnicities based on one individual.  

If you seriously believe Israel intentionally bombed the USS Liberty then you are at odds with virtually every historical account and the US government itself, which not only concluded it was clearly a mistake but later released NSA tapes of the Israeli pilots' conversations which make it very obvious.  Israel had zero motivation and probably wet its pants at the mistake, later paid compensation, apologized strenuously, etc.
 
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Nick_A

Provider of the year (2014)
Most of the orders we get from China are fine. The high fraud countries for us are Brazil, Indonesia, and Vietnam. There's probably a good case to be made to not accept orders from any of those or all of them.
 

PacketPunks

New Member
In my opinion I think providers choose how they run their business, should that include banning entire countries from using said providers services is completely up to the provider.
 

lolitseasy

New Member
China is my bread and butter. The US is the source of the most fraud.  Everyone has different experiences  I have many fine US and Chinese customers, but I dislike the blatant stereotyping of Asian customers. People are people, it's just the view out the window that differs.
I mean every host has a different experience. If majority of their bad experience is from a certain region it's natural for them to generalize.
 

Servers4You

Member
Verified Provider
It should be up to the hosting provider whether they support a country, some countries have a high risk level (according to MaxMind and FraudRecord) however supporting as many countries as possible would also help your business succeed.

I would recommend supporting certain countries if you have a targeted audience, such as the European Union or just the United States

Regarding the China talk, we have always required secondary checks with clients of China just to verify orders however MaxMind usually stop orders and require them to contact support to get it overridden.

We get a lot of clients from the United States and United Kingdom for dedicated servers for projects or start up companies that are building websites etc.
 

nuweb

New Member
Verified Provider
I have a couple good customers from China, they're not all bad. It's a shame that it has to be the way it is but honestly with such a high rate of fraud from just a few countries there's really no other choice.
 

TO.oL

New Member
language barrier and frauds are two most important things to consider while choosing to stop doing business with certain countries. countries whose customer would hamper your actual business with the more lucrative countries should be dropped.
 

Internetbrothers

New Member
Verified Provider
Banning the whole country is not a good idea.  It is very disrespectful and not a good idea. It should be handled case by case. Fraudulent orders will eventually come.
 

web-project

Member
Verified Provider
we do block the high risk countries and some selected countries we just refuse the orders due to abuse of service in past.
 

KuJoe

Well-Known Member
Verified Provider
Banning the whole country is not a good idea.  It is very disrespectful and not a good idea. It should be handled case by case. Fraudulent orders will eventually come.

If 100% of the orders are fraud then what is the point in letting the orders through? The only reason we've blocked any countries from ordering from us is when 100% of the orders are fraud (that means that not a single order did not result in abuse, fraud, and/or chargeback and we have a very small number of countries that fall under this category). And it's not like "oh man, every order today from this country has used a stolen credit card/Paypal, better block them all", it's more like "wow, every order from this country since 2014 has used a stolen credit card/Paypal or resulted in a chargeback, better block them all".


The worst part is that we've made exceptions when people opened tickets claiming they are legit and we've manually approved those orders in the past but 100% of them ended up getting terminated for either spam, outbound DOS attacks, credit card chargebacks, or something else resulting in lost revenue.
 
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arussell

New Member
It's worth running orders through some kind of automated fraud checking. We've used MaxMind for years for this sort of thing. If you use WHMCS then there's built in support for this. It filters out the vast majority of fraudulent orders (though no automated system is going to be perfect).
 

vRozenSch00n

Active Member
Based on my experience of rejection, (mostly happened a couple of years back), I always ask a provider a simple question before I sign up for a service.

Dead Customer Service team,


I'm interested to use one of the offered service, do you accept orders from Indonesia? I'd be able to pay by Credit Card or Skril.


Thanks for your kind attention.


Best regards,


My Real Name
 

gordonrp

New Member
Verified Provider
There are a few countries for which we direct prospective clients to specific resellers, to eliminate the language barrier. It results in zero fraud for us (reseller takes that risk), and accounts/orders that last longer. Win win for everyone involved.
 

PowerUpHosting-Udit

New Member
Verified Provider
It's completely up to the company who are operating the business to decide whether they want to allow a particular region to buy their services or not.
 
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