>This is particularly tricky when the answer is actually "no".

If the answer is actually "no", then the customer service person will tell you it's "a little difficult". You're supposed to understand that that means "no, we can't do it". Of course, many foreigners don't get this, so then they'll change gears and just say "it's impossible".

>If you're used to American customer service, you may find European customer service to be blunt or curt

I don't see accusing your customer of fraud as simple bluntness or curtness.

>Again, if they aren't trying to win every customer, this isn't really a problem.

If they don't want to expand their business outside of Europe, I guess that approach is OK.

"Try again, and this time provide real data" would be considered very rude even in Germany.

Without reading the actual wording sent, and knowing which culture the sender was from, this is all just speculation. I'm more interested in challenging the assumptions that we have about our own expectations in customer service being universal. From the rest of this thread it sounds like there is a commonly held opinion that Hetzner customer service is blunt, and my point is that that may be fine and maybe customers should not expect to be treated in a particular way all the time.

Well, we haven't seen the data.

Since I wasn't there I can't say what happened. Can be a language thing too, I can imagine that the intended meaning would be "Try again, making sure you spell everything exactly as the data on the card" but it came out as "Try again with the real info". In germany the English language is very optional, it's not needed for any media consumtion since everything is being dubbed and/or translated. This leads to less experience using the language.