Imagine that you come across a store or a private seller that has sprouted its roots in the United States, and is also paranoid that its billing system flatly refuses to accept your Orthodox visas and master cards issued by domestic banks.

It would seem that there is nothing left but to buy a credit card with US billing from their respective comradesclose the store page a bit, having gone in search of a friendlier seller, as you notice the familiar PayPal nameplate hung by the site owner, inviting everyone to purchase its goods, paying in the most convenient way for you. And here it is, victory, you are busily walking through the pages of the checkout process, when you suddenly realize that the seller of little that does not accept Orthodox cards for payment has become so insolent that he sends his goods only within his homeland, scoring on worldwide and international shipping related problems.

If receiving an address for receiving parcels in the USA has not been a problem for a long time, then how to get an American address available for selection when paying with PayPal? Yes, PayPal does not allow regular account holders registered in a country other than the United States to add an American delivery address.

But for every tricky asshole, as you know ...
The way to add an American delivery address (however, like any other address other than the account's country of registration) has been known for a long time, and, in principle, is not a secret. On specialized forums, a guide on how to add an American delivery address is already distributed without any hesitation, so I decided to make this information available to all suffering.

Not too sophisticated users may ask, “what prevents adding an American address to the PayPal address book directly from the personal account of the service?”. But the PayPal security policy that prevents us from adding addresses to the fact that the country cannot be changed at the address will prevent us. If you have registered an account with a primary address, for example, of the Russian Federation, then you can’t change the country in the “Country” field of newly added addresses, and “Russia” will be written for all addresses there. But for this, I gathered you all here to show how easy, simple and safe it is to bypass PayPal policies, as a result of getting an American address in the list of available addresses pool.

I will intentionally apply the filter “captain evidence” to screenshots, not a mockery of the Habr’s users, but for inexperienced users who’ve come to the Habr’s search.

Step 1. Add a US address to your PayPal address list

In your opinion, what close union of PayPal will be used by us to add an American address to the PayPal address book? That's right, of course, the older brother of the stick will help us in this, the largest auction site is eBay.com. To be honest, we will be happy with any site that allows you to enter an arbitrary delivery address and paypay after payment, but in order not to bother you with the problems of finding such sites, we just use the good old eBay.

All we need in the first step is to add an American address to the eBay address book and buy anything using a freshly added American address. We are lucky because eBay has no prejudice in this regard, and your delivery address may be at least in Uganda. Therefore, after logging in to ebay.com you just need to go tolink to the address management page and add a new address:
The screenshot above and hereinafter will include the address of the mail-forwarder of  shopfans , which I use when delivering goods from the United States. But just adding an American address to the list of available ebay addresses will not give us anything, in the next step we need to make a purchase of something by choosing a freshly added address in the USA as delivery.

There is no point in describing the buying process on ebay, all of you have already bought something there.

Just select some small things, for example, this cute droid on the left, which I bought exclusively with the aim of adding another American address to the PayPal address pool.

Immediately after making the payment for the goods sent to the desired address in the states, we can proceed to step No. 2.

However, it is worth noting that the American address we entered will still not be visible in the address list of your PayPal account, but they will be visible in the PayPal payment process.

Let's imagine that you all got something on eBay using an address in the USA and are ready to start easy flirting with PayPal address policies.

Step 2. Activating the US delivery address

Okay, move on to the interesting part. If the addresses of countries other than the country of registration are not displayed in your PayPal account, then somewhere should they be? Yes, you can see them if you go to the order payment form using PayPal:

By default, PayPal uses your primary shipping address on the checkout page. As you can see, the St. Petersburg address is displayed there, which we are now going to change to an implicitly added American one.
It is already becoming clear that any delivery address that you used to pay paypal will be available in its address pool, it just won’t work out. Let's see what we see if we try to change the delivery address by clicking on the “Change” link:

After you have made a purchase on Amer. address via ebay, the standard address selection form will take on the form shown above. As you can see, immediately under the usual addresses of your country, a block of addresses appeared that PayPal kindly designated as inaccessible to choice (our system does not allow you to ship to these countries). Our foreign address looms there, but (this is bad luck) the control for its selection is not active ...

And this is where the simple and childish workaround of our problem lies! Why paypal shows us addresses that are not available for selection - I don’t understand, but this is their choice, we can only take advantage of this small loophole.

Surely, a middle-aged geek already figured out how to turn an inactive radiobutton into an active one, but I repeat, we’ll cheat it (carefully, KO will broadcast) for the smallest, tea is not proud.

So, what we need is any browser on Webkit (Safari, Chrome) or FireFox with the FireBug plugin. Armed with one of the tools, we begin the easy preparation of the form for choosing an address.
Further, all the screenshots show the steps taken in the Chrome browser (in Safari and FireFox + FireBug everything will be very similar).

We’ll make the third address selection active, for this, simply right-click on the line with the inactive address and go to viewing the element code:

Well, then everything becomes obvious. We get to the html code of the div element, in which all that is required of us is to erase the disabled attribute:


Everything, bingo, deleting the attribute makes the element with the cherished American address active, and we, as they say, are free to go.
You can close the window with the developer mode and enjoy the active radiobutton:


Actually, this is where the main part of the Marleson ballet is over, in such a simple way we got access to the choice of a delivery address with a country different from that used when registering a PayPal account, which was the purpose of this instruction.

As an afterword

Okay, we added the amer address to the stick, but what benefit can be gained from this?

First of all , you can stumble on eBay with capricious sellers who right here so brazenly write something like this - “ship only to confirmed USA PayPal address”. This phrase in the listing of the lot can mean nothing, and can lead to problems with sending the lot, which is useless to us.

Okay, we’ll show him the American address in PayPal, but what to do with his confirmation? You will be surprised, but PayPal is so strange that when making several successful sendings to your American paypal address, it can assign it the status confirmed:



There is only one problem, having received a confirmed status with one purchase, you can get unconfirmed with the next. It seems that the phase of the moon somehow affects the assignment of a verified status, so there is additional. life hack that often works.

If the seller stubbornly wants to get a confirmed address, and the phase of the moon when buying was clearly not in your favor, and you received an unconfirmed status, then just do it. Show the seller a saved screenshot with a successful confirmed status, or even send him a letter of extract from paypal, in which stands confirmed. It works in 90% of cases.

So having an amer address in the paypal address pool gives you direct access to previously closed lots for you.

 

Secondly, as I wrote in the introduction to the topic, in some stores you may encounter the fact that cards issued by banks of non-democratic America will not be accepted by the transaction center, then paypal with an American address can be your lifeline. But, I must warn you that not always choosing an American address in the address list guarantees successful payment, often the store arranges an additional check on the "country of registration" of the account, and you won’t get anything done (at least legal).

In general, if now the American address seems unsuitable to you, then anyway add it when you need it, it is always better to have a joker in your sleeve.

PS. As for the safety of using this method: the technology is already in its second year, while I have not heard a single case of claims from PayPal, but, nevertheless, this is a bypass of the standard procedure, so use it at your own risk.