As someone who uses a US Apple Account as my main account, one of the biggest annoyances is payment.
Buying gift cards in advance can avoid the problem, of course, but it adds one more step every time. Virtual cards are also an option, just not an ideal one for me:
- Gift cards work, but topping up every time is annoying.
- Virtual cards exist, but stability and risk control make me uneasy.
- China-issued Visa, Mastercard, and AE cards cannot be linked directly to the US App Store.
After circling around, PayPal plus a China-issued Visa, Mastercard, or AE credit card became the most realistic route.
Realistic, yes. Easy, not really. A US PayPal account is not exactly friendly to register.
Starting with failure
Four years ago, I got my first Visa credit card: the ICBC Constellation card. It had no credit limit and required preloaded balance.
I tried using that card to register PayPal. I even bought a Google Voice number and used a Wikipedia donation flow to bypass the VoIP check. In the end, the account was banned before I even reached the final step of linking it to the App Store.
Earlier this year, I applied for an AE card, my first real credit card with an actual limit, so I tried again.
Still failed.
This time the registration itself went through, but the account was quickly limited and asked me to upload ID documents. I uploaded my Chinese national ID card, and the account was permanently banned almost immediately.
There is a common misunderstanding here.
Many people assume a US PayPal account cannot be appealed with a Chinese passport. After all, the account region is the US, so it feels like PayPal would naturally require US documents. That is not really true. Many Chinese users living in the US with a green card or visa are not US citizens, and their Chinese passport is their legal document. For PayPal, that is a normal user scenario.
In other words, a Chinese passport should be perfectly valid as documentation.
I just did not have a passport at the time. The support agent was kind enough to move my account back to the document-upload step, but I had nothing useful to upload, so I gave up.
There is another practical issue: after a PayPal account is permanently banned, you basically cannot close it normally, and you cannot unlink the card yourself.
So if a card is linked before the ban, that card is very likely unusable for any new PayPal account.
That is the conservative reading, at least. My subjective feeling is that it may not be absolute. If you keep appealing through support, maybe there is still room for normal handling.
Not that simple
Later, I came back with my passport and the CMB Ganyu Visa card I had applied for because of Apple Pay.
This time I stayed on a direct connection the whole way, only briefly turning on a proxy during registration so reCAPTCHA could load. Registration went smoothly, but before I even reached the card-linking step, I received another permanent-ban email.
This round felt different, though. I had done very little, not even a proper login yet, so I was more willing to spend time figuring out what actually happened.
I asked online support. Thanks to that agent, they directly told me where the problem was: the address I entered during registration was wrong.
Before this, I had been using a random address generated by some online US address generator, and I reused it across many US-region online services. But I forgot to verify whether that address actually existed.
I checked it on Google Maps. Sure enough, it did not exist.
Survivor bias
The final successful flow was surprisingly simple:
- Stay on a direct connection as much as possible.
- Find a reasonable real address on Google Maps.
- After registration, avoid high-frequency actions and let the account sit for two or three days.
I stayed on a direct connection, found a reasonable real address on Google Maps, then registered and linked the card without trouble.
There is no need to obsess too much over whether first name and last name are reversed. Based on my previous appeals and some discussions online, PayPal probably handles this kind of mistake and does not treat it as a major risk signal.
I also configured routing on my phone and downloaded the iOS app in advance. To be safer, I let the account sit for two or three days after registration instead of immediately linking it to the App Store.
When I finally linked PayPal in the App Store, I ran into one more small problem: tapping the PayPal option would not open the authorization popup, and it kept saying the action could not be completed.
After debugging, I found the reason: I had routed Apple-related domains to direct connection as well. Temporarily switching them to proxy made the authorization window appear normally.
Finally, I tested it by subscribing to Claude Pro. The payment went through perfectly.
After that, I tried to avoid touching PayPal as much as possible and just let it quietly handle App Store payments.
Afterword
So far, I have kept PayPal on direct connection and only used it inside the App Store. About three months have passed, and nothing has gone wrong.
Still, I do not think the earlier failures were caused by the address alone. IP, behavior, card type, phone number, and previous attempts could all affect risk control.
Later I shared my experience with a coworker, and they registered successfully too. So this flow has at least some reference value.
So if you want to try this too, I would keep these in mind:
- Do not rush to link your card. Let the account sit for a while first.
- Do not fill in a random address. At least confirm it exists.
- Minimize abnormal behavior, especially frequent network changes.
- If the account gets limited, patiently ask support what actually happened.