Gunbroker suspended my account because I logged in while visiting Germany?

[Narwhal]

Hi,

Gunbroker recently suspended my account because I had to go to Frankfurt on a business trip. I emailed them with a reply, but they haven't re-instated my account. This is pretty outrageous. Obviously I'm a US citizen and live in a southern, gun-friendly state. Banning someone simply because they must go overseas occasionally for work is pretty ridiculous.

So this is just a rant/heads up, if you go on vacation, don't log onto gunbroker. I'll give them a few more days before I give up and never use them again, I guess.

:banghead::banghead::banghead::banghead:

PS: Optics planet does the same thing. If you buy something from them from a foreign IP, they won't sell it to you even if you have a US shipping/billing address. They've lost my business permanently over that issue, unless they have something I absolutely cannot find anywhere else.

 

[mljdeckard]

It's a security precaution. I can't make excuses for their timeliness of resolution, but this is pretty standard for lots of businesses.

 

[Narwhal]

It's a silly, stupid precaution in my opinion and only an annoyance to legitimate US citizens who have to travel overseas periodically. VPN's are so cheap that circumventing an IP ban is stpuid-easy. I usually don't bother to turn on my VPN unless I'm in a totalitarian-censorship state like China, however. I guess I should use mine more often. The only reason I don't always use mine is that the VPN slows my connection speed by 50%.

If someone is going to take the time to export weapons through gunbroker, I'm sure they'd take the time to buy a $10/month VPN.

 

[Ignition Override]

Some US hotels have computers in Business Centers which also block almost any gun website.
They tend to allow Wikipedia, which can sneak in an article on guns.

One such hotel Was the Little Rock Doubletree (on the river) about two years ago, but after I complained, a few months later the geeks loosened the search filters.

What usually appear is something like "....Minors...." or "Forbidden-German militaria" etc.

 

[tarosean]

Gunbroker recently suspended my account because I had to go to Frankfurt on a business trip. I emailed them with a reply, but they haven't re-instated my account. This is pretty outrageous. Obviously I'm a US citizen and live in a southern, gun-friendly state. Banning someone simply because they must go overseas occasionally for work is pretty ridiculous.

I am kind of used to it by now... The only place Ive had serious issues was PayPal. They would not reinstate my account till I received a letter from them at my home address, and entered the password/"code". Course this was all AFTER I won a couple auctions and I couldnt pay the person (s) for several weeks till I returned home to the US.

Course the inconvenience is better than some hack in Africa or elsewhere figuring stuff out and running up debt.

 

[mljdeckard]

It's not THAT silly. When making decisions like this, they look at a variety of circumstances. The truth is, a sudden transaction happening on a different continent is a BIG fraud indicator.

 

[BSA1]

I have had my bank account hacked twice this year. The lastest was from someone in France. Fortunately it was detected before a lot of money was stolen from me.

 

[hso]

You're over reacting.

There are sound identity theft reasons to flag accounts with unexpected activity.

There are export restrictions that have to be followed.

The only thing that is appropriate about your ire is their lack of response, but what effort have you actually made to get them to reinstate your account other than sending an email (which they could also consider suspect of being hacked)?

 

[Trent]

BSA1 - you need to use strong passwords, and never use the same password on more than one website. Often a password gets nicked on a forum, or whatever, and then the attackers use the same login / password on every bank out there.

Standard operating procedure for bad guys.

Everything that has financial access deserves a unique password, upper and lower case, a number or two, and when allowed, a special character.

You'll find your "incidents" will go away, permanently, at the inconvenience of remembering a few more passwords. It is possible, but takes time to commit them to memory; I run a couple of datacenters and have to remember well over a hundred different passwords at any given time.

 

[Trent]

(Forums, social media, etc often don't guard their passwords NEARLY as strongly as banks and other financial institutions. The former has NO requirement or standards to comply to for security auditing.)

 

[Narwhal]

You're over reacting.

There are sound identity theft reasons to flag accounts with unexpected activity.

There are export restrictions that have to be followed.

The only thing that is appropriate about your ire is their lack of response, but what effort have you actually made to get them to reinstate your account other than sending an email (which they could also consider suspect of being hacked)?

Okay, but just for LOOKING at gunbroker overseas they suspend my account? I didn't even buy anything, just logged in to check feedback on a recent purchase I had made from home and look at some auctions (didn't bid on anything). That's a bit over the top, wouldn't you agree?

Do you know of any other way to contact gunbroker other than through their email system? I don't see a physical address or phone number listed anywhere on their site. Is it too much to ask to at least send an email to my listed email address before they suspend me? They didn't even do that.

In fairness to gunbroker, they did reinstate my account today, but I missed out on a good deal on something I wanted to buy because they did this. I guess it's their site so they can run it as they see fit. Caveat Emptor.

My main point is just to warn people not to log onto gunbroker at all if they go overseas, or at least use a VPN if they do.

 

[12131]

Okay, but just for LOOKING at gunbroker overseas they suspend my account? I didn't even buy anything, just logged in to check feedback on a recent purchase I had made from home and look at some auctions (didn't bid on anything). That's a bit over the top, wouldn't you agree?

Do you know of any other way to contact gunbroker other than through their email system? I don't see a physical address or phone number listed anywhere on their site. Is it too much to ask to at least send an email to my listed email address before they suspend me? They didn't even do that.

In fairness to gunbroker, they did reinstate my account today, but I missed out on a good deal on something I wanted to buy because they did this. I guess it's their site so they can run it as they see fit. Caveat Emptor.

My main point is just to warn people not to log onto gunbroker at all if they go overseas, or at least use a VPN if they do.

With all those "smileys" in your OP, yeah, you're overreacting. Of course, you overreacted, because you missed out on a good deal.

 

[CZguy]

My main point is just to warn people not to log onto gunbroker at all if they go overseas, or at least use a VPN if they do.

You may want to go back and read your original post.

 

[Narwhal]

You may want to go back and read your original post.

You're going to need to elaborate.

 

[JBrady555]

I wanted a gunbroker account but when I tried to sign up my account was immediately flagged for some unknown reason. They now want me to fax in my ID and a bill with my address on it. I said forget it and just use budsgunshop and gunsamerica.

 

[hso]

That's a bit over the top, wouldn't you agree?

No, that's good protection in the event of identity theft. They shut your account down the moment it flagged to prevent anything from happening.

Is it too much to ask to at least send an email to my listed email address before they suspend me?

Yes, since someone impersonating you could do a lot of damage to your reputation while the hours slid past before you might have seen that email.

Heck, I had to call once from FL because I hadn't used my bank card out of state for a couple of years (I use a specific credit card when traveling to track those expenses). They shut the card off at the pump and I was forced to call the CU and then be transferred to the security office after authenticating my ID. I was momentarily annoyed, but then relieved that they acted so promptly.

 

[Narwhal]

No, that's good protection in the event of identity theft. They shut your account down the moment it flagged to prevent anything from happening.

I respectfully disagree that it's good protection if it's going to shut people out just for logging in from an overseas IP. It's an over-reaction, especially considering how easily those with malicious intent can mask their location and circumvent this "precaution" just by using a VPN.

 

[harrygunner]

There are proxy sites around, some free.

One can set up a proxy server on their home PC so they can effectively VPN from wherever. Their laptop/smartphone would appear to connect from your home static IP address. Straightforward for nerds, but not so much for the typical user.

My company only offers our services to North America. So entire continents are blocked from even accessing our servers. If Gunbroker did that, it would save them and you hassles. You would not have been able to connect and they would not have to disable/reinstate accounts.

 

[JohnKSa]

I respectfully disagree that it's good protection if it's going to shut people out just for logging in from an overseas IP.

Someone logging in from an overseas IP means that someone overseas has your password. That is, in my opinion, generally a strong indication of a compromised account.

It's an over-reaction, especially considering how easily those with malicious intent can mask their location and circumvent this "precaution" just by using a VPN.

Basically what you're saying is that it will only catch stupid criminals.

That's ok with me. A lot of criminals, maybe even most criminals, are stupid. It doesn't make sense to give them a free ride for being stupid.

If we take your approach, then there should be no safeguards against the use of stolen credit cards in face-to-face transactions because a smart criminal wouldn't do something that likely to get him caught.

 

[BBDartCA]

Happened to me when I was in Europe a few months ago. I just sent a note to tech support and they had the account reactivated in less than a day.