The problem isn&#x27;t Paypal.  The problem is competing sets of laws.  You&#x27;d have the same problem with a bank, or any startup that cared enough about what it was doing to actually follow financial institution laws.<p>PayPal makes you create a new account because each country has different requirements for financial institutions and customer data retention.  Often times, laws in one country conflict with the laws of another.  In some cases, like moving from the US to Europe, under EU laws it would be illegal for Paypal to maintain the US account data, but under US laws it would be illegal for Paypal (as a financial institution) to delete that account data for a period of several years. The KISS solution: just make the customer create a new account, subject to the laws of the jurisdiction they are moving to (and stored in a system compliant with those laws), and transfer any money in the existing account using existing mechanisms with their existing reporting processes that have been sanity-checked thousands of times by prior transactions.