Philippines, Technology News & Reviews
Xoom, an online payment facility, sent out notices about 2 days ago that it will disable its Merchant Payment Interface after August 1, 2008 and suggests all users to remove links to such payment landing pages.
Continue reading ‘Xoom to disable Merchant Payment Interface’
About 2 weeks ago, I was able to reactivate a 4-year old dormant Paypal Premier/Business Account. I’ve been using that account now to receive funds from advertisers as well as pay some online bills. Now that I have both Xoom and Paypal, I’ve been contemplating which of the two I should be using more often.
Here my quick analysis of the two:
Continue reading ‘Paypal or Xoom: Which one is cheaper for Publishers?’
After several blog posts and discussion over the recent Xoom Password Recovery Facility (see Easily Cracked Xoom Accounts?), Xoom has wisened up and fixed that feature.
Marhgil posted about it here after checking back on their system.
That was quite fast. At least they’re monitoring blogs or reading emails huh?
Marhgil pinged me about Xoom’s accounts being easily hacked (I think it’s more like cracked). He explained more about it here on his blog.
Since I have been a regular Xoom user, I was very curious on how this could be done. So, I tried the simple steps he outlined — figure out the login email, figure out the bank account number, and figure out the zip code. Let’s look into how easy it is to find the 3 required data to reset your password.
We’ll use a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the hardest to figure out and 10 being the easiest.
1) Email Address - if the Xoom Account owner has a webiste or a blog, chances are his or her email account is posted there. This is practically the easiest data to mine on the net. I’ll give this 8 points in the scale.
2) Bank Account Number - I’m not sure if the regular Xoom Account holder adds his or her bank account in their Xoom profile but what’s the likelihood that this person also publishes his or her account number online? Ok, maybe for people who have some sort of business and posts his bank account online, this could be a huge drawback. I’ll give this one just 2 points in the scale.
3) Zip Code - there a good chance you can find a person’s address online, depending on how much info he or she publishes on the internet. Say 5 points?
Adding up all three factors, we get something like 15 out of 30. That’s dead even. Actually, the critical information there is the bank account number. So, it really depends on the Xoom user and for people like me this sure does pose a huge security risk. I tried cracking into my account and was able to do so with Google in less than 5 minutes (without cheating!).
Now, let’s say someone cracked into your Xoom account. What can he do with it? Not much actually. he can change your password and profile but that’s about it. If you send money, you’ll still have to supply and verify your Paypal account ot credit card account.
So there, not a really huge deal for most but it’s all worthy to look into.
*Email dispatched to Xoom support.*
Updates: You can now have a Paypal Philippines account. Just sign up here. You can withdraw an amount not exceeding $500 per month to any debit, credit card or directly into your Philippine bank accounts. You will just need the bank codes and savings account number.
Maybe you’ve already heard of the plan and the efforts to make Paypal available in the Philippines.
Though I think we’re still far from getting that much coveted nod from eBay (owner of Paypal), I think it’s good to know that there IS a way to get paid by people who has Paypal. If you haven’t heard of it yet, spell X-o-o-m.
I know, it’s not the real deal, but it’s close enough. So how do you receive payments from Paypal users?
That’s it! Xoom payment limitation is from $25 to $2,500 per transaction. If you don’t have a bank account, you can opt to pick up the cash in the bank within minutes (list includes Equitable PCI Banks and Cebuana Lhuillier) or have it delivered into your doorstep. I was even able to get my remittance delivered at 9:00 in the evening before — good for people who are away during the day or at their offices working.
You can choose to receive the money in peso or dollar denominations. Is it expensive? Depends on what you’re comparing it to. If you send $50, there’s the $3.50 fee (7% transaction fee). If you send $1,000, the fee is just $8 (or 0.8% transaction fee). These fees apply if you want to receive in Philippine peso but it’s a little more if you opted for US dollars.
The catch? Their peso-dollar exchange rate ain’t that good. Today, it’s just US$ 1.00 = PHP 50.8687. Still if you factor that in, it’s still cheap.
Some guy contacted me the other day wanted to advertise on my site so I asked him for $45 for 3 month’s for a single link to his website. I sent him a payment request via Xoom and I had the money in just over 3 hours. See the tracking code for preview.
I know it’s not the real deal. We still ought to have our very own legit Paypal account somehow. But I’ve been using Xoom for 3 years and it works.
I think one way of convincing eBay to add the Philippines in it’s list of supported countries is by using 3rd-party services like Xoom. If eBay notices that there are tons of transactions going into the Philippines from people currently using Paypal, they may think that we’re not a high-risk country anymore.
[tags]paypal philippines, xoom[/tags]
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