US-based company PayPal, the biggest digital payment system in the world, has notified customers in Crimea that it will stop providing services to residents of the peninsula.

      “It was a very difficult decision for us, but unfortunately, we are currently unable to provide services to clients in Crimea,” PayPal said in a statement on Friday.

      Crimean PayPal users say they received the first notices of service termination on Thursday. Some of them have already got their money from PayPal accounts back to their Russian bank cards.

      Paypal, as well as Apple Inc., Google, Visa, MasterCard and many other US-based companies, stopped working in Crimea soon after the US President Barack Obama had signed an executive order, which bans the US export of goods, services and technology to Crimea and follows several rounds of western sanctions against Russia.