

Ask HN: Safe ways to recieve small amounts of money in India (no paypal)? - rick_2047

This may be a stupid questions, but I have already accepted in my most famous blog post that I have made asking stupid questions a habit.<p>I received a small gig after I posted a comment on HN (I just love you all). The payments will be small, around 12-15$/ payment (menial work I suppose) . The problem is I have never done an international transaction before. I have a bank account which does support internet banking, but a cousin of mine has informed me that there can be some problems if I receive payments in Dollars (or any other bank currency) directly to my bank account. I don't want to you paypal because a) I do not have my PAN card ready yet, and b) I have heard too many horror stories about it.<p>So my question is, is there a safe way (tax department safe, if you know what I mean) to get such small payments in India?
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kingsidharth
Hmm. It's almost impossible to get money in India without Govt. knowing about
it - RBI is way to smart for you.

Try Western Union? It's for personal payments thought - so make sure they have
no problem sending it that way.

Call up your bank and ask if there is a problem in you receiving money in
dollars, I don't think there should be any.

$12-15 are just 500-600 bucks. Don't bother much, if there is too much hassle,
just skip the money.

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rick_2047
I too am planning to do this one just for karma (the real one, not the HN one
:) ) if it becomes too much a hassle.

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kingsidharth
Sounds cool! Or ask them to buy you a domain name and get a website going :P

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rick_2047
My thoughts exactly

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vineet7kumar
If you are getting money for some website or some service and your customers
are general users, I guess it is best to stick to paypal (please get a PAN
card ASAP). General users might be uncomfortable to use other lesser known
methods to make payments. "So my question is, is there a safe way (tax
department safe, if you know what I mean) to get such small payments in
India?" Please do not evade taxes. Do follow legal means to save them but do
not do anything illegal (i.e if you mean this way).

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hippich
I am thrilled by something new emerging - <http://bitcoin.org>

If you like emerging technologies - check it out!

~~~
eof
I put like 3 months of cpu time into generating coins, while the difficulty
raised an order of magnitude and the value has gone up a couple orders of
magnitude.

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hippich
BTW, you always can accept PayPal and never deposit it to your bank account.
Instead spend it for purchases on ebay, hosting or domain name.

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oomkiller
Hawala?

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vkdelta
Unless you want to send him to tihar

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mahmud
What? Why?

Hawala is perfectly acceptable. I use it to transfer money throughout the U.S.
because it's cheaper than Western Union, and faster than bank transfer. 5
mins, $6 to send $200.

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zaidf
Xoom.com

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rick_2047
I checked out the site, seems really nice. I think the payer would have to
register yes? Another question, I do have a PNB account (their trusted local
partner) but do not have netbanking activated for it. Do they allow transfer
to other banks say SBI. Also have you personally used this?

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zaidf
I've used it a bunch over the past 5+ years.

Payer does not have to register. The money is just deposited into their
accounts, though it could take upto a week especially if you pay using your
bank acct and not credit card.

There should be a list of banks they accept. It's pretty comprehensive I
think.

