Ask HN: You Have Been Blocked (Half Price Books Blocking Denmark)?

1 bryanrasmussen 8 7/21/2025, 12:27:03 PM
So I was going to https://www.hpb.com/ for my first time ever as I have a bunch of books to sell, and I figured it might make sense to sell a large portion of them in bulk.

And I got blocked

From Google search half price books, and it did verifying you are human. And then it gave me the message

Sorry, you have been blocked You are unable to access hpb.com

Why have I been blocked?

This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks. The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.

What can I do to resolve this?

You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked. Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page.

Cloudflare Ray ID: 962a9a7879a792ec •

Now I can't actually email the site owner as I can't get into the site to find out who the site owner is to tell them their security is a bit overzealous.

I am not on a VPN, my browser is FF without plugins.

But I am in Denmark and going to just hpb.com without trying www.hpb.com first (so in fresh browser, safari) gives me the following

403 ERROR

The request could not be satisfied.

The Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to block access from your country. We can't connect to the server for this app or website at this time. There might be too much traffic or a configuration error. Try again later, or contact the app or website owner. If you provide content to customers through CloudFront, you can find steps to troubleshoot and help prevent this error by reviewing the CloudFront documentation. Generated by cloudfront (CloudFront) Request ID: Zxyp7jHDpqD8YMam6c20ZfBkumiC9mh1GYofKmP8RjzJcvf72I3MYQ==

Which is nice to know that they are blocking me from Denmark for some reason instead of just doing their other bullshit first.

So does anyone know why Half Price books seems to be blocking users from Denmark?

Comments (8)

bryanrasmussen · 1h ago
I think it seems like it blocks outside the U.S, some of the other bulk used book sellers seem surprised that you want to use them outside the U.S, so I guess in the EU the one to use would be biblio.

Still seems silly, instead of saying hey you're blocked and nobody knows why it should just say hey we don't serve the country you're in right now.

beardyw · 3h ago
Never heard of the site, but it blocks me too from the UK. Maybe it's blocking everyone.
PaulHoule · 4h ago
Something is rotten in Denmark -- Hamlet
bryanrasmussen · 4h ago
It's "Something is rotten in the State of Denmark"
warrenm · 4h ago
First problem - Cloudflare
OhMeadhbh · 3h ago
it's because you're using FF.
JohnFen · 3h ago
They don't block me, and I use FF.
stop50 · 4h ago
Probably the GDPR