I send money to 'the third world' a lot and it's extremely easy without having to resort to crypto nonsense. Hearing these implausible points repeated every time this question comes up just seems desperate now.
This is good to know about (and a great idea) - i'll take a look later. The other issue with using a VPN is people can no longer use the 'social pack' which is a cheap social media only data package available on all the networks.
I'm living in Uganda at the moment and have a couple of things to add:
1. VPNs still work fine (I'm using one right now, though its one I installed on a digitalocean instance - it's possible those receiving lots of traffic have now been blocked).
2. This tax is unaffordable for many Ugandans (it would be about 5% of the average wage here). Whatsapp is very popular here and this has impacted everybody I know. Most people I've talked to are using a free VPN (they aren't aware of the risks here).
I haven't done much analysis of the blocking yet but I will be doing a more in-depth post about this whole debacle in a few days.
We had issues every few months because the server we were assigned would be added to a RBL. Customers would notice, we'd talk to Mailgun and they would move us to another server. rinse, repeat.
The only way to avoid this was to get a dedicated IP which is an additional $59 / month.
I'm not sure why Mailgun couldn't detect this themselves, maybe they do now.
One of my friends was caught out by a similar scam last year. There is plenty of prior art for airbnb to look at when developing a safe platform for people to communicate through. At the very least they should disallow exchange of e-mail / non-airbnb websites via the platform communication channels.
I was somewhat dumbfounded when I was asked for my apple id and password when I went to get my screen replaced at the apple store.
After some debate with more senior team members, I reset my password to something generic and gave it to them, but it sets a bad precedent for customers who should be educated into never giving their password, under any circumstances.