Buying Apple American App Store applications from Canada

Here’s a quick tip that originally came from @binarylibrarian. Buying Apple App Store items for your iPhone or iPad requires a credit card from the appropriate country, so if you want to purchase items from the US store you must have a credit card with an American address (at the time of this writing certain iPad applications are only available in the US store, including iPad iWorks applications). As a Canadian this is a problem, since most credit cards require identification checks. However, there is a loophole.

If you purchase over-the-counter prepaid credit cards you can type in any reasonable address and the App Store accepts it (this is probably technically fraud, but it seems like an innocuous white lie). I have personally tried the Vanilla brand of Mastercard purchased from Shoppers Drug Mart and had great success. There is a $5 charge for the card, but otherwise you have a normal pre-paid credit card with any arbitrary address.

Combine this tip with a US VPN (like BlackVPN), and you can download Pandora or ABC Player, set up the US VPN on your iPad, and listen to free music, and watch free TV, as if you were an American (but without the unfortunate politics).