Update: PayMPESA Helps Withdraw Your PayPal Funds to MPESA
Update 20 May 2011: It has been reported that www.exeauto.com is a scam. Proceed at your own risk.
Some time last year PayPal did us a favour and made it possible to maintain a PayPal balance with a “Kenyan” PayPal account. This meant that we could finally receive money via PayPal in Kenya. However, withdrawing that money turned out to be a whole other story. Why? Because PayPal has no relationship (currently) with local banks. They need this in order to allow “Kenyan” PayPal accounts the ability to withdraw to a local, Kenyan, bank account. In plain English, this means that you can have money in PayPal but you cannot take it out.
The only way to take it out – and this is what PayPal themselves recommend – is to withdraw to a US bank account. Unfortunately, not many Kenyans have one so this is a very real and very serious problem when it comes to dealing with PayPal from Kenya.
Fortunately, there is another way.
Liberty Reserve
Liberty Reserve is a digital currency and online payment system with similarity to Paypal, E-Gold, Pecunix, E-Bullion and other E-Currency services. You can send or receive money to or from anyone in the world.
How do you use it to get money from your PayPal account? It is simple, actually. This is what you need to do:
- Create an account at LibertyReserve. It is free.
- Once your account is up, then you need to move your money from PayPal into your new LibertyReserve account. The different ways of doing this are listed here. At this moment in time, the one that will accept money from PayPal is this: www.exeauto.com
- Once the money is in your LibertyReserve account, you can withdraw it in a lot of different ways. You can, for instance withdraw straight to your bank account, via Western Union, AlertPay etc.
Please note that getting money into or out of LibertyReserve is done via the third parties listed here.
Easy enough? I have not tested this method (will be doing so shortly) so if anyone can quickly vouch for it wqe would all be happy.