I know it is possible for non-US residents to buy games on Amazon by changing their billing information. If you replace your city, state and postal code with a location from US, it should work. However, that's obviously against their terms of use:

4.2. Geographic Restrictions. The Store is currently only available to customers located in the United States. We regret that you may not use the Store if you are outside the United States. "United States" refers to the 48 contiguous states, the District of Columbia, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

4.3 Suspension and Termination; Waiver; Amendments. Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate without notice and without refund of any fees if you fail to comply with its terms. We may terminate the Agreement or restrict, suspend or terminate your use of the Store at our discretion without notice at any time, including if we determine that your use violates the Agreement, is improper, or otherwise involves fraud or misuse of the Store or harms our interests or those of another user of the Store.

Regardless, many non-US residents still successfully bought games from Amazon and suffered no consequences. I would like to hear recent experiences because holidays are coming and Amazon is known for having better deals than Steam nowadays so I intend to make full use of that.

Thanks.

11 years ago*

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I'm in UK and bought Borderlands GOTY + Borderlands 2. I've never really looked at their sales much but they have some pretty damn awesome ones on there. The main game I'm eyeing now is CS complete pack which doesn't seem to be on any other sites...

I'd just say keep an eye on Amazon, Steam, GMG, Gog etc.

11 years ago
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I'm in Argentina and bought Max Payne 3 in amazon, and i've never been told anything about billing information, and still works out for me, so, i had no problem with amazon

11 years ago
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I bought Xcom for gifting (and a dlc for myself) and the bioshock dual pack without any problems.

11 years ago
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Giving fake address is more that just against Amazon's terms of service only. Customers have to pay taxes and duties to their own country. For example, if they buy an item in a country where a tax like VAT has a 15% rate, disguised as a member of that country, while in their own country is 22%, their country loses the whole taxation imposed by the law.

11 years ago
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so sad that 50cent tax is avoided.. In a single trick big firms avoid hundreds of millions and no one bats an eye

11 years ago
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That's why people usually put states that don't have those taxes, such as California.

11 years ago
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You missed the point. That has nothing to do with what I said.

Amazon isn't legally allowed to sell and you aren't legally allowed to buy. That is all. Doesn't matter what their Terms of Service states or what they do.

11 years ago
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You have to pay sales tax if you use a California address.

11 years ago
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"Customers have to pay taxes and duties to their own country."

Not in America, this kind of tax in the Amazon example goes by state. Only certain states have to pay tax with Amazon purchases.

11 years ago
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We are talking about non-US citizens who doesn't live in America. If I buy a game worth 100 €/$/£ from my Steam Store, Steam must pay to my country 22 €/$/£ as tax (it has to apply a 22% VAT rate). And that would be what Amazon is requested to do by my country for each my purchase I do from them while I live here and not in US.

Same logic can be applied to US people who live in a state and use a fake address to pay less, I presume.

11 years ago
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You presume incorrectly. No one, including Amazon has to pay taxes for cross state sales. Imagine duty-free shops for sales at borders. That is what it is like in USA. Only residents of states where Amazon has a physical presence pay sales taxes, sales taxes are actually on a business, not consumers they are just passed on immediately and directly to consumers.

11 years ago
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yeah, then tell my country to take the knives from my back and put in reasonable prices... (to get a $40 game it costs me $70, to get a $60 AAA game it costs me $100 and for special edition it costs me $130)

11 years ago
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Just use the address of a US McDonalds or Starbucks and you can buy games without a problem.

11 years ago
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xD

11 years ago
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Indeed.

11 years ago
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Is this legal then? I may try to buy Dark Souls.

11 years ago
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It's not really legal, but everyone does it.

11 years ago
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I think you should be safe if someone else buys it for you.

11 years ago
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To clarify, unless you live in a country with legal reasons why buying an item from Amazon US is illegal, you're fine. It is, however, against Amazon's TOS, so you could get your account banned, transactions cancelled, etc. Unless you do something spectacular, though, you probably won't get arrested or anything.

11 years ago
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people have been doing this for a really long time. Amazon is renowned for their customer service, they're not the type to be bureaucratic about the terms of service and use it against legitimate customers. As long as your payment method is legitimate there's a 99.999% chance you'll have no problems.

Also, note that you'll have to pay tax if your "address" is in a state that Amazon has a physical presence so choose accordingly.

11 years ago
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That's good to hear, cheers.

11 years ago
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I tried using a border address and they ask for a credit card before every purchase; and then deny the purchase because the card is non-us....

11 years ago
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borderlinx and amazon gift cards wink

11 years ago
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Even using borderlinx, amazon still asks for credit card verification before getting anywhere ":/

Created a new account specifically for this and still need a US cc.

11 years ago
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No problems with non-us DC(Debit Card)

11 years ago
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I have to say I also "use" Borderlinks, but what do they actually do, apart from providing a US address that one could easily google anyway? It's not like anything physical (including receipts) gets delivered there, right?

Also, no problem with my non-US card.

11 years ago
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Are you providing the borderlinx address as the "billing" address? If so, shouldn't the billing address be the same as what is on the cc?

I guess. that's what it is. THAT seems more fraudulent than buying games from non-us places.

11 years ago
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CC dont have adresses on them, your CC account does but thats not something amazon ever need to see

11 years ago
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Never really thought of it that way. I've done that before though; used my credit card and had different info from billing and card address, thus almost getting dinged for fraud. Just cautious now, not dumb (even though it looks that way).

11 years ago
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no, i'm just using the borderlinx address for the shipping address, for all amazon knows i might just be buying a present for a friend of mine in the us.

11 years ago
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I'm afraid that's my billing address, but like the blindio said, I don't think that's tied to my CC.

11 years ago
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nope, just for the address, also you can use it to actually get stuff sent from the us physically if you need, it might be cheaper than just buying it where you live.

11 years ago
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Sure, I was referring to digital goods such as Steam games. So there's no real benefit from Borderlinx as opposed to a random, existing address. And thinking of it, it could actually raise a red flag.

11 years ago
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I've bought a lot of things and games on amazon, I use my grandma's address, so you shouldn't have a problem buying

11 years ago
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recently (yesterday) bought the slingshot dlc for XCOM: Enemy Unknown which was apparently only for US residents... with an australian VISA card i had no problem.

11 years ago
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As long as Amazon gains money, they don't care about it so why do we care? You may say this is against they policy they made. But holy god, why they have to make regional pricing policy or things like that? They should make the same price and open for international purchase.

edit: sometimes, I think I live in US in 4 dimensional or 5 dimensional space. lol

11 years ago
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They do not have permissions to sell outside US and if they had, we would have to pay euro-prices.
And they would have (thus we) taxes too, even they were to keep US prices, saving would be minimal.

10$ ~ 9.2€ after taxes (without currency conversion fee).

So I'm glad it's not officially open.

11 years ago
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They're not going to call Valve and demand their Steam key back.

11 years ago
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I bought They Bleed Pixels a few months ago, and have never had any issues. More recently, I snagged the BioShock Triple Pack. Too good of a price to pass up!

11 years ago
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use borderlinx site to get a US address, use that address to buy games from Amazon.

11 years ago
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+1 I use this.

11 years ago
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Thanks everyone for replies, it sounds promising so I'll give it a shot today. :)

11 years ago
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just google 'american hotels' choose one and use that address, worked for me.

11 years ago
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LOL lol lol

11 years ago
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Bear in mind some games from Amazon are actually region locked to North America. It is exceedingly rare, but it happens. For example this steam db query has Mafia 2, Railworks 2, some base Civ V with "Amazon" in title, however when you dig deeper Railworks 2 seems actually not locked, but Mafia 2 and that Civ V one are (AllowPurchaseFromRestrictedCountries will prevent you from activation if not in one of given countries, but should run otherwise if you move regions, that's allowrunonly or something). I think there are more locked ones, I don't remember now. Do your research.

11 years ago
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Metro Last Light, Saints Row, (anything by Deep Silver / Koch Media)
Naruto (Not locked, but multiplayer is splitted in two regions America and everywhere else EU, depends on serial, not actual location)
Inversion

11 years ago
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Looks like recent site problems messed with my reply... Anyway, I used Indiana as location and there were no problems. Thanks to some money I had on my gift card balance I managed to buy COD:BO2 for less than $15.

11 years ago
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I've been buying digital games from Amazon for almost 2 years, not even one problem in this time. I'm a Spanish boy living in Spain by the way.

11 years ago
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Closed 11 years ago by sublime2k.