Hey guys!

I just came back from my local custom office. I bought some VB games from the USA few weeks ago and I was waiting for them. Today I got a letter from the German custom office to fetch my packet. So I went to the office to controll if the games are complete and unspoiled, because the postal clerks open it. Fortunately they didn’t cut open the VB game boxes 😉 At least I had to pay a tax of 20 Euro (= 25$). It’s okay, but unnecessary! I never had problems with imported products before. Who cares about some old imported VB games? ME! But why I have to pay to the state? Stupid German laws :rolleyes

Somebody else from the European Union or other non-Amercian countries have this problem too?

btw: I don’t like Apple. But did you know that Apple’s iPad in Germany is the most expensive in the world? The cheapest model costs 499 Euro, thats 633 Dollar! It’s not only Apple’s greed for money, also it’s the German state. :thumpdown:

Heh, yeah, I get that too sometimes here in Sweden. Sometimes when ordering from the U.S (I think when the value is more than $50 or something), and always with stuff from Japan when they ship by EMS… I recently had to pay around €10 tax for a pokemon mini system 🙁

Here in Spain happens the same. The usual tax they charge you is 19.5% (18% VAT + 1.5% import) over the declared value. If you don’t want to pay those taxes, you have to tell the person who’s sending you the product to declare it as a gift (green label in the US), so that they think in the customs that it’s not a commercial transaction and therefore cannot charge you anything, since there’s no declared value. This is OK for cheap games and things you don’t mind getting lost in the post (most of the times they don’t get lost, but sometimes they do), but not for valuable products.

When I bought SD Gundam and Virtual Bowling some years ago I had to pay taxes. I told the sender to insure the games for an amount worth $200, even though I had paid much more, because I didn’t want the games to get lost in the post (something insured has way less chances of getting lost) but I didn’t want to pay 200 euro of taxes either. When the games got to Spain, I had to pay 35 euro of taxes (at that time VAT was at 16%, not 18%) to collect them. And those 35 euro were the percentage of the $200 of declared value.

Also some years ago, if the amount you had to pay was less than 10 euro of taxes, they usually didn’t care and send it to you without you having to pay, but since European governments are in desperate need of money, they are probably getting all the people to pay these import taxes, even if they fall below the 10-euro. I hope this helps in future deals.