IP Address Troubles involving Purchases
 

So I've been trying to purchase some things off of sites recently and I've had THREE bounce-backs or denials of accepting my pay.

I didn't think back about it, believing that my bank was fucking up. The thing is, my bank had trouble changing over my card address to my Houston one. I'd put in Billing Address or Home Address and it'd shit itself since it wasn't the Houston one. I got that ironed out just before I moved BACK to Bryan. So I had trouble buying again, and assumed it was the bank. I already called them up and they said they fixed it already so I was angry.

Well I just tried something and it denied me again. I called them up and the person on the phone asked me (after looking at the purchase-attempt log):
Well, lemme fill folks in on this. I work offshore, and my boat is a Norwegian make. Its electronics, satellite service, everything is all Norwegian.

I've moved in to a new apartment, I've got a static IP address here, I've made one of my purchases at my parents' house and got the same result. Basically, there is a stamp or brand on my IP somehow that is saying "I'M EUROPEAN~"

I can make purchases on PayPal and the like very easily, but when going through a site itself for the purchase, I'm getting denied. Does anyone have software or some sort of program solution? This is REALLY pissing me off and I'd love to have it stopped.

Yes, when you are on your boat, you may obtain an IP address that is from a Norwegian address block, if the boat's networking service points back to Norway. But when you get back to your home in Texas, on your internet service, you are going to have an IP address that is very much from an American address block.

Now there are some security measures that are available that will associate your account on the site with a region of origin, so that if you set up the account and it looks like you are in Norway, when you try to make a purchase from your house and it looks like you are in a completely different geographical region from the account's origin, which would be the case, the security software says "hmm that is unlikely, someone must have stolen his information - denied". So uh, could you try to make a purchase from a different computer that has never been on the boat, you know, for fun.

This is the only computer I have :(

How about creating an account and making a purchase from a site that you have not purchased from before?

Or set up a simple proxy at your apartment on a small spare rig, and tunnel through that?

He just said he didn't have but the one computer, and that wouldn't make any difference really. His computer will not have any foreign IP address assigned to it when he is at his home in Texas. When he is on his ship, he probably gets assigned a 192.168.x.x address, or some other address that routes through his corporate internet gateway, so if he were on the boat accessing a site, it would see the Euro IP address. When he is at home on his own internet connection, if he is using DSL, a website he is accessing will see the IP address assigned to his DSL modem, since most DSL modems I have seen are assigned the public IP and then assign whatever is connected to it an internal, usually 192.168.x.x IP. If he is using cable, well, most cable modems basically just pass the public IP directly to the device connected to it {router or PC}, so that is what a website would see. The only way that a website would see him as being in Europe when he is at his home is if he had an active VPN connection to his corporate network and was accessing the internet through the VPN connection using the corporate internet gateway for http and https traffic, which is unlikely. If I am the only one who understands what I just said, I am going to be sad.

I haven't made use of VPN-oriented software in over five years =( So that's not it. To narrow things down, I am on Cable Modem.

I tried disabling my static IP address, releasing, then renewing, but I had the same base IP address (192.168.1.100 prior to forwarding).

Well, that 192.168.1.100 address is not what the outside world sees as you, since that is an internal address. Your modem is assigning that address to you, while it is being assigned the public address that the rest of the world sees. If you hit 192.168.1.1 in an internet browser, it should take you to a web interface for your modem that will show you its IP address, which is the one that the outside world sees. Unless your ISP is doing some freaky stuff, or it just acquired a new block of addresses that were previously reserved for use in Europe, the outside world {i.e. internet sites} will see you as being in the US.

If anyone tells you anything different, I would have to question where they got their information.

Any chance you've got cookies hanging around your computer that might be identifying you as a European customer? Perhaps they do something like that to prevent people from using proxies or whatever from ordering via a US IP.

Yeah, I just dumped my cookies about half an hour ago. We'll see if that somehow fixes things. But I never visited these sites on the boat =( Hmm

I am well aware of how this all works russ.

I figured he was implying he only has the one machine with him on the boat, not just the one machine total. My bad for assuming incorrectly though.

Well, clearing cookies didn't work. But two of the three joints required accounts to make purchases. I made those on the boat, so it might've logged the IP address out there for reference. I dunno...

Anyhow, I made a new account on two of the sites, tried re-ordering, and it worked out. So problem solved I... Guess...? :( Thanks for the tips, fellas