New PayPal regulations (and some PayPal alternatives)

Has anyone here tried to pull money out of PayPal over the past few days?

I’ve been trying to get some money out of my PayPal account for the last few days to no avail. My wife talked to the bank and eventually they figured out that I was having trouble because of a new law that is being put in place in November.

I’m a little hazy on the details, but according to the bank, anyone who uses PayPal or other forms of online banking to pay bills, income tax etc. needs to apply for approval to do this because of new regulations that are being implemented in November.

This is not just for foreigners but also Taiwanese.

I have to go to the immigration office with my ARC (and pay NT$250) to apply. We called the immigration office and they confirmed that I need to do this. I’m not sure what I’m getting whether it’s some number or a different ID card, but I’m going next week so hopefully I’ll have a few more details.

Anyone here know anything about this?

I only know that now you cannot send funds between two Taiwan based Paypal accounts. According to Paypal, this was a “service enhancement”?!

“Taiwan market: Paypal enhances service by disabling domestic payment processing”

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I received some money in my Taiwanese paypal account from the US. I had to set up a bank account with ESun bank (only bank to link with paypal) and make sure you tell them the purpose. The online application didn’t work and I spent two hours in the bank opening an account. Your name on the Paypal account must exactly match your ARC and bank account. For me, i didn’t have my middle name on the paypal account and I had to contact paypal to add it.

After you get the account, you can link it from the esun bank website to paypal. When you send the money from paypal to your bank account, you will get a call from the bank to ask where the money is from, why you have it.

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I’ve actually used PayPal a number of times so everything was set up correctly. It’s just been in the last few days I’ve been having trouble. The bank people can’t seem to figure out what the problem is either since they told me I would be able to get my money out today but it’s still having problems.

I get a message stating “(IMS-E138)Central Bank limit enquiry is busy, please try again later or contact branch” and no one at E Sun bank seems to know what the problem is.

Just wondering if anyone ever came across this problem before.

Well, they finally figured it out. Well, at least I got my money but I have no idea what the problem was and they couldn’t explain it. Hopefully, it won’t be a problem next time I need to take money out of PayPal.

Good news. I’ve just started using Veem.com to receive money from other businesses in the US. Perhaps I need to look at Bitpay or Bitcoin soon? I really hate hate hate banks no matter which country they are in.

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how does it work? can you send money here using it?

In Taiwan and in China, Veem only supports receiving money. I wish it supported sending money. I have added certain factories that I deal with to my pre-approved list at the bank, and supposedly, i’ll be able to call in next time instead of writing ancient characters at the bank.

how do you take the money out ? can you use an overseas paypal or a bank to send it to a veem account and draw the money out here?

Veem is linked to my bank account. i get an email and then can accept the payment. When you sign up, you need to provide proof of your business which for me was my business registration.

Let me know what you find out. I’ve been meaning to do it (bitpay), but keep putting it off. I’m curious how easy it is to use, and how easy it is to lose money too.

Yeah, I hate banks as well. I lose a lot of money to bank transfers and exchange rates. One of the problems is that a lot of the online banking alternatives are not available in Taiwan so you can’t take advantage of it. I was looking into TransferWise because they have a program where they will give you bank accounts in the US, the UK and one other place that I can’t remember right now. You could then have your US clients send money to the US bank account and you can them move it around TransferWise’s global system. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to work here. I think the restrictions for some of the countries where it does work are the same as veem (can only receive, not send)

I really want to find an alternative to PayPal since their fees are so high and the exchange rate is usually crap. I might check out Veem and see how it would work.

How hard is it for clients to send you money through Veem? Can they just use their credit card or do they need to go to the bank to transfer the money? I need to make things as easy as possible for people to send me money.

I get the feeling that all this banking backwardness has the usual explanation: a small number of people making shitloads of money out of the status quo. I can’t imagine any other reason why services like Paypal and Transferwise don’t work here. Transferwise even works in the bloody Philippines, and you don’t get much more vested-interest-ridden than the Philippines. Works in China too, up to a point. It really is infuriating.

Aikaili: thanks for the veem link. I don’t often need to transfer money from abroad, but when I do, I have no other choice but to use an ATM, which is painful.

Veem is really for business to business payments. Maybe I need to rethink having the money come into Taiwan? I thought I needed that for accounting purposes.

Your business can have a bank account anywhere in the world. If most of the income is from the US, maybe your TW business can open a US bank account? For local TW accounting, you would need to declare this account and the amounts would be converted for reporting. But you are not required to have all your funds in one country.

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The government can have some of my money for healthcare, education, infrastructure, shiny killing machines, and some for the less fortunate. But, to dictate to me how deal with the rest, is taking it too far. This has the smell of pay-offs and corruption all down the line. A more convenient and economical way to do commerce has the -as mentioned above- “Status Quo” on alert. Why fix what has been broken for years? They get their monies.

If the DVD rental places had a better lobby, then I am sure online streaming services would be out of here. To a degree…Chunghwa has started choking the internet, probably as a result. I can only imagine the others will follow suit.

To be fair, the west is not much better. Ancient tech still thrives and has its fans in governments. Free market my ass.

I have been transferring online earnings from Paypal to my Esun bank account for a number of years. Today it asked for some type of digital certificate PIN number to complete the transfer. Seems it is a new rule that came into effect Oct.31. Has anyone else run into this?

Yeah, I ran into it. I haven’t done it yet but apparently you need to go to the immigration office and apply for that number (you need your ARC). I don’t know if it’s just for PayPal or for all wire transfers.

From what my wife was told, it costs NT$250 to get the number. I have no idea why the government decided to implement this. I think it’s supposed to be some sort of anti-money laundering thing.

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There is some info on how to get the Alien Citizen Digital Certificate in this thread. Sounds rather gruesome unless they have improved things since then.

It’s kind of dumb, I applied when I needed to renew my APRC. They don’t send it with your card, you can’t even pay on the spot. You have to pay somewhere else, I didn’t figure out how and where, so until now I don’t have the Digital Citizen card.
It would be easy, apply, pay get the card sent by mail, done. No, all these stupid bureaucratic hurdles!