Bricklink suspends Marketplace operations in 35 countries

Looking at the list of countries, living in one, and knowing how much the west is cracking down on money control. This reeks of anti-money laundering controls.

Some really big/rich markets on the list (Brazil, India, ME..).

I don't think LEGO is big in most of those countries (at least not in India), so they might be trying to slow down the secondary market in order to grow sales for new products.

I wonder what the story behind this action is? It's surprisingly short to the shutdown, and they seem to indicate they wanted to keep those markets open, as otherwise I feel like they wouldn't falsely give people hope they might open it up again:

> We will review this decision regularly, and we hope to be able to reopen the BrickLink Marketplace to LEGO® fans in these countries in the future.

Shutting it down in (almost) the entire South America doesn't feel like it makes financial sense, can't be such a small market that it wouldn't be worth keeping it open.

I get why for some of these countries, but Brazil for instance doesn't look like complicated situation or a small market in any shape of form ?

Is anyone finding relevant political or regulatory patterns in the country list ?

Direct link to the list: https://www.bricklink.com/help.asp?helpID=2687

Greenland is an unusual entry on the list given the nature of Lego as a firm.

>To put this into perspective, the total combined population of these countries exceed 2.5 billion, or just about 30% of Earth’s population which is wild.

Doesn't look like anybody can make 35% of their revenue from those countries though, does it.

Is this due to the same payment processor issue that was impacting Steam-PayPal users earlier this year? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44891570

I've been a member for 25 years (yikes, since it was Brickbay) - I'm not sure why Lego company wouldn't have the resources to handle this compared to the prior smaller company.

A reminder that danish company LEGO took the concept from a british psychologist who later committed suicide in the 1950s due to financial issues, and they only later paid out his descendants for rights to the product in the 1980’s in order to legitimise their ability to sue other companies making lego-like products.

no explanation?