For a while I have been frustrated by the OVI store while abroad. There are some paid applications only available from the OVI store and one in particular (currency converter that increases the supported currencies to 170) I wanted while abroad. However the OVI store only allows credit cards to be used when you're in the country registered to their billing address, which means basically that you can't buy anything on the OVI store for the N900 while abroad, since credit cards are the only form of payment (for the N900 - for other phones, e.g. the N8, you can get the charge billed to your local phone account, though this only works if you actually have a local SIM card and doesn't work with all SIMs). If you try to purchase an application, it will give you an error as if your card has been declined, but in fact the OVI service never even gets as far as trying to charge your card, it simply blocks all transactions that are not originating from the same country registered to the credit card billing address. (And if you look at their TOS, you'll see this blocking explicitly mentioned there.)

I finally found a solution. You need to have a VPN account that supports OpenVPN and gives you an IP address in the same country that your credit card is billed to. Install OpenVPN and OpenVPN GUI and set up and log in to your VPN account (I use hideipvpn which is good for the US, UK, Germany, and Denmark, but which is not free unfortunately, though it is cheap). Then when you go to the OVI store it will think you are in the same country as your credit card and you will be able to purchase and download applications. Yes it violates the TOS but who cares.

Given that this is supposed to be a security feature of the OVI store, one which by the way I haven't seen on any other online store, and given it is this easy to circumvent (once you know how), isn't it a rather dumb security feature that just ends up inconveniencing a lot of bona fide Nokia users and preventing sales?