Banks and cards from different country with the same PayPal email

...well sort of.

PayPal doesn't have the concept of people that live or travel to different countries. If you try and setup banks or credit cards in two different countries you will find it impossible. For starters, the address fields are limited to your initial country and there is no way around it.

Call PayPal and they say that you cannot have bank accounts or credit cards from different countries on the same account - why - you just can't so don't ask. They suggest creating a new email with an extra number on the end for each country. WHAT! I'm not sure about you, but I already have far too many username/passwords to remember as it is.

For a long time I just accepted this situations and only had a single account and just paid for everything with normal channels in other countries. However, that recently changed when I wanted to buy something from UK ebay and the only channel was PayPal. I tried once more to add my UK credit card to my Canadian PayPal account. The billing address was a mess and clearly wasn't going to clear if I tried it.

It was at this point I started looking into creating a new email address for the UK to sign up for a second PayPal account. And that's when it hit me. I use gmail as my main email and gmail allows you to put periods anywhere in your name without it making a difference. That is. johndoe and john.doe are the same in googles eyes. In fact j.o.h.n.d.o.e is the same as johndoe. But to PayPal they are very different. Bingo!

I simply put a full stop between my first and last names of my email and I have a second PayPal account with the same email address in a different country.

All my PayPal notifications from both accounts go to the same gmail address.  I don't have to find a new email address, remember a new password (yes I use the same password for both PayPal accounts - but it is insanely long and complex.) I can buy using PayPal in each country. I suppose I could also transfer between each account, although I've not actually tried that and it probably isn't a service I really need.

I really don't like PayPal, I think their model is very broken and I doubt it will ever chip away at Visa or Master Card until it changes.  Now I have a UK PayPal account I still couldn't use my UK credit card because I had to wait 2-3 days to verify my account. Surely Visa and Master Card have done that already, they have 3D secure for online transactions, why does PayPal always seem to block your use of their service?

I hope this workaround can help you in time of need - just don't expect it to work without delay.