A bit of computer assistance, please

[Raging Turtle]

The situation:   Since I live in Korea, buying English versions of new games can be a bit of a pain, so I typically only get downloadable games, such as Magic Online, or more recently, Half-Life 2.

But for the past few months, I can't seem to make online purchases with my credit card 95 percent of the time; I keep getting a 'we can't validate your personal information' message (from Magic Online) or 'Your credit card has declined your purchase' message (from valve/steam).   Thing is, I've checked my personal information a dozen times, and it matches perfectly.  I called the credit card company, and they said that their computers don't even show that I've tried to use my card, which it should do every time I attempt to use it.  So I'm thinking its something on the computer thats blocking me from buying.

I've run ad-aware and spybot to get rid of any spyware that may be plugging things up, I've turned down security to accept all cookies, I've turned off my firewall to see if that worked.  But nothing helped, so now I'm asking you folks, who know a lot more about computers than I do.

The card works fine in stores, and for some reason City of Heroes had no problem with it (was tough to find the download webpage, though), and once in a blue moon a credit card request will work, as though nothing is wrong.  But even if I try it again immediately after it works, with the exact same information, I'll get the error message.

Any help is apprieciated, and if you ever come to Korea, I'll buy you a bottle of Soju.

[Trippy]

These days credit card checks are extremely complicated since there is so much fraud over the Internet and it could be any number of things that is causing your card to be rejected by the fraud check software that is being used (this is being done before it even hits the bank as you've learned). Some things that might be causing a problem:

[*]You are entering in the wrong 3 digit card validation number
[*]You have a non-Korean billing address but your IP address is showing that you are from Korea or vice versa
[*]You have Korean bank issued card and Korean billing address but perhaps that country has a high incident of fraud so lots of numbers automatically get rejected
[*]You have a US issued card that somehow got onto a "blacklist"[/list:u]
Some suggestions:

[*]Get another card with a new number
[*]If you have a US card, get a Korean credit card or
[*]Have a friend in the US setup a HTTP proxy and connect through that to buy stuff so that the IP address that the seller sees is a US one (you might have to be a little more clever and fake the User-Agent as well)
[*]Another way is to get a dial up account in the US and dial in long distance just to do purchases (again this will make your IP show up as US based)
[*]Call the customer service number and do the transaction over the phone[/list:u]

[Biobanger]

Rent a P.O. Box somewhere near a friend, get a new US credit card with that address, have friend pick up confirmation at P.O. Box, immediately choose not to recieve paper bills and only electronic ones to your email.

[SirBruce]

Yeah, my guess is it has something to do with you being in Korea and the particular game not accepting a Korean address, or IP address, or something.  Since the card company says they didn't even try to charge you, the game interfaces themselves are filtering you out before you get there.  Your best to solution to find out why is to talk to the customer service of those particular games.

Bruce

[Raging Turtle]

For the record, I'm using an American credit card based off a legal American address.  

An Korean IP problem seems likely from what was said, so I guess the next step is to contact the individual game companies and see what I can do.  I'd try that IP-proxy stuff, but frankly I don't have a clue how to do that.  Thanks for the help

Edit:  I'd try to get a Korean credit card, but that's generally more trouble than its worth because foreigners such as myself have a reputation for running up a huge bill and then leaving the country without any kind of forwarding address.