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Is this really necessary though? Personally, none of my cards will allow me to dispute a transaction until it posts as a charge not merely an authorization. Se

• 13of40 11y ago
  It would be nice if you could have some kind of "leading edge" trigger on it, so if there's a transaction from a merchant that's unique in, say, the last two months, you get an SMS. If someone steals your credit card and goes on a shopping spree they're unlikely to do it at the same stores you go to.
• tzs 11y ago
  > Seeing as you have 60 days after posting to dispute a charge, immediate notification seems like overkill. It's often much more than 60 days. We had a chargeback at work that was a couple months over a year old. That surprised me...I had thought that a year was the limit. That's not actually the most surprising thing I learned about credit cards last year, though. We got a notification from the payment processor near the end of the year that a charge from March had been reported as a success but actually failed. By "reported as a success" I do not just mean that the API had reported success on the charge. The payment processor had also reported later that it had successfully settled. They just never actually transferred any money to us. While talking to them on the phone the payment processor rep then told me that the same thing had happened on the charges on this customer's monthly subscription for all subsequent months. According to the payment processor rep, the customer had told his bank that he no longer wanted our service (but neglected to tell us...). The card was still good, and so the bank still said "approved" when we would try to charge it, then would apparently later notice that the customer did not want the charge and somehow arrange to block settlement, and the payment processor apparently has no way to report this. Notice how messed up this is: you can put through a charge on a credit card, have the issuing bank and payment processor tell you it went through, have it settle according to the payment processor, have it show up as successfully settled in all reports from the payment processor...but the money just doesn't show up. Unless the payment processor tells you about this, the only hint you'll have that something is wrong is that there will be a discrepancy between what is supposed to have shown up in your bank account and what actually showed up, and you won't have any way to tell which charge is the one that silently failed.
  • leesalminen 11y ago
    That's crazy! My business is heavily involved in CC processing and I've yet to encounter this. Do you mind if I ask who the processor was?
    • tzs 11y ago
      I never heard of that happening before either. I suspect the problem is with the issuing bank, not the processor. (I don't recall offhand what bank was the issuing bank, other than it was small and obscure enough I've never heard of it). I'd prefer not to name the processor since I suspect that the same problem could happen at any processor when dealing with cards from that issuing bank so I don't want to drag the processor's name through the mud.