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Anti-fraud departments have apparently not gotten the memo, and the whole situation has gotten obscene in the last few years. I regularly travel for work and i

Anti-fraud departments have apparently not gotten the memo, and the whole situation has gotten obscene in the last few years. I regularly travel for work and it's impossible for me to make any purchases on major sites like Walmart, Best Buy, Target, Costco, etc. They all will accept an order, charge my card, and then randomly cancel the order some hours to days later, and refund me. Similarly when traveling internationally, Schwab bank decided they didn't like one of my debit charges and blocked the card. I called Schwab and they gave me some "publicly sourced" 3 question quiz about myself that I apparently failed and they locked my entire account until I can fly back to the states and come into a branch. Luckily I have a 2nd bank account and was able to change my payroll. But it's just insane to me that some random debit charge has resulted in my inability to access most of my money or my brokerage positions. I hear similar issues and horror stories from all my coworkers and friends that travel.

fsckboy 3y ago
out of curiosity, are you "privacy conscious", as in minimize sharing your location, personal information, etc? I have a pet hypothesis that a lot of the security heuristics they use are based on being able to spy on you everywhere you go, and the trail of digital litter you leave behind "confirms" it's you where you are. It's difficult to draw conclusions from my own experience because the security landscape changes and I don't know what other people encounter. I do know people who spend their lives online on the phone and they don't complain about having problems blowing their whole paycheck every week; like for instance my assistant who doesn't either have trouble purchasing things for me.
- deathanatos 3y ago
  I happen to share a name with somebody in my family, and these risk-reduction facets literally cannot tell us apart. I've been told "wrong answer" when giving the right answer to questions about myself, but they're asking me questions about a different person, because again, having the same name is sufficient to get mixed up, apparently.
pembrook 3y ago
Ditto to this. My experience has been very similar to yours. The amount of incompetence involved with payment processing and banking is just mind boggling. KYC/AML is very quickly turning into bizarro big brother. But not an all-knowing AI big brother. A stupid 2005-era IP address detecting one. You do a little too much traveling? Poof. There goes a month of your life to banking jail. A simple two-factor mechanism like passkeys or authy (that isn’t based on SMS to unreliable US phone carriers) would solve about 99.999% of this.
- teh_infallible 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - NegativeLatency 3y ago
    The dislike is not from the technology itself, but from its current applications and 2nd order effects. Most of which currently have not been great.
  - judikidd 3y ago
    Famously user friendly crypto. Where nobody ever loses access to their assets in perpetuity.
  - hannob 3y ago
    Yeah, sure. I mean "we don't do fraud detection, it's literally one of our design decisions that you can't do anything after fraud has happened, and also, fraud is kinda in our DNA" systems are totally well suited to solve that.
    - justanorherhack 3y ago
      It's more like you have total agency and the burdens that come with that. To each their own!
    - roenxi 3y ago
      Famously, the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero. We may yet discover that the amount of fraud in crypto is superior to the fiat systems. In COVID times governments noticed that freezing bank accounts was an option. Having systems that cannot be subjected to that is wise; even if it involves high costs.
mgoetzke 3y ago
Same here. While in a Nike Store in London, I could not use my Barclaycard for a 50 EUR purchase. So unheard of to use a Mastercard for purchasing something while on vacation. Used a different card which worked fine. No SMS or notification on my phone to verify myself either. Wrote them a mail to ask what this was about and why I cannot use my card, but they only wrote back that the card was not blocked and everything was fine, but sometimes they are afraid of fraud etc.
- avianlyric 3y ago
  I’m a little confused, a 50EUR purchase in London, UK? Also which country was the Barclaycard issued in? You’ll probably also find that banks are much twitcher around merchants like Nike and Apple because their products hold value really well, and are easy to sell on the second hand market. Makes those products a really great way to exfiltrate stolen funds because the products are almost as liquid as actual cash.
RockRobotRock 3y ago
90% sure these questions come from Experian/Transunion or something like that. Curious about how these APIs work and how hard it is to get access.
quickthrower2 3y ago
Is this an American thing? I never get a card decline for any purchase on a credit card. Prepaid cards are another matter.
- wslh 3y ago
  I think so, not an American citizen but travel often to many places and remember Dell cancelling my notebook purchases ~5 times in a day (in two different years) until I call to a sales representative. I share the same experience in Dell with American citizens.
- blitzar 3y ago
  America and Americans have a much higher predisposition to credit card fraud than the rest of the world.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  It's probably on transactions that are requested solely based on the card number, and no PIN. I got hit by these blocks with a EU card a long time ago, as the shop was trying to pass the charge with the magnetic strip. Had to phone to the VISA center to let the charge pass through on next retry. Nowadays I'd assume any "card in the machine" transaction done with a PIN would go through no questions asked, even if you're located in Antarctica on their database.
  - mcv 3y ago
    This is the thing that surprises me most about credit cards: you can pay with just the information that's easily visible on the card. And you share that information directly with the merchant. Surely that's a gaping security hole? I'm not surprised they need to be paranoid about fraud, if it's that easy. When I buy something with my bank card, I always have to provide my PIN. If I buy something online, the site redirects me to my bank, where I authenticate myself with my bank's system, and then authorize the payment with my bank's system (involving 2FA), and then the bank tells the site that the payment has been authorized. The site can blindly trust my bank and can immediately ship stuff to me, because the payment will go through. I've never had any blocks nor fraud issues with this system.
Tuna-Fish 3y ago
> I regularly travel for work and it's impossible for me to make any purchases on major sites like Walmart, Best Buy, Target, Costco, etc. They all will accept an order, charge my card, and then randomly cancel the order some hours to days later, and refund me. These sites are not cancelling your orders. The card-issuing bank is. If you have persistent trouble, switch banks.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  Disagreed, the banks aren't cancelling it - they wouldn't authorize the transaction in the first place. Chances are, the banks are correctly returning an address verification mismatch if you didn't use your true billing address. Most likely the stores are cancelling the orders because of billing/delivery address mismatch or (if you didn't set a different billing address) that it doesn't verify against your card.
  - nucleardog 3y ago
    Or, in the case of one particularly annoying site I tried to order from--a name mismatch. The site was clear upfront that everything had to match EXACTLY or they would cancel the order. I logged in to my online banking and copy and pasted my debit card details to make sure there were no issues. The one thing I didn't think to copy and paste was my own name because, I mean, I know my own name, right? Apparently not as I'd entered "John Public" and to my surprise my debit card was issued to "John Q Public".
    - justsomehnguy 3y ago
      And here are I am who always writes %BANK NAME% and it works. Though my bank always demand 3DSecure.
alemanek 3y ago
I have been traveling internationally continuously for 6 years and haven’t had any of these issues. I use Schwab, Capital One, and Chase for banks and credit cards. I don’t stay any one place longer than 6 months; usually just 3months in a country. When my bank card expired Schwab even overnighted a new card to Peru for me. I order from Amazon a fair amount and don’t have any issues. Maybe you are in this weird algorithmic grey zone where you don’t travel enough so everything gets flagged. Where for me I have been traveling for so long that nothing gets flagged.
- Spunkie 3y ago
  I've been traveling issue free for a long long time before these things started happening. It's really only in the last couple of years it's become a problem. Also I don't have issues with classic eCommerce stores like Amazon, Newegg, B&H, ebay. It's only the new wave of eCommerce stores trying to enter the market this decade, like all the big box stores. It's like they all got sold the same crap anti-fraud software/service.

fsckboy 3y ago

out of curiosity, are you "privacy conscious", as in minimize sharing your location, personal information, etc? I have a pet hypothesis that a lot of the security heuristics they use are based on being able to spy on you everywhere you go, and the trail of digital litter you leave behind "confirms" it's you where you are. It's difficult to draw conclusions from my own experience because the security landscape changes and I don't know what other people encounter. I do know people who spend their lives online on the phone and they don't complain about having problems blowing their whole paycheck every week; like for instance my assistant who doesn't either have trouble purchasing things for me.

deathanatos 3y ago
I happen to share a name with somebody in my family, and these risk-reduction facets literally cannot tell us apart. I've been told "wrong answer" when giving the right answer to questions about myself, but they're asking me questions about a different person, because again, having the same name is sufficient to get mixed up, apparently.

pembrook 3y ago

Ditto to this. My experience has been very similar to yours. The amount of incompetence involved with payment processing and banking is just mind boggling. KYC/AML is very quickly turning into bizarro big brother. But not an all-knowing AI big brother. A stupid 2005-era IP address detecting one. You do a little too much traveling? Poof. There goes a month of your life to banking jail. A simple two-factor mechanism like passkeys or authy (that isn’t based on SMS to unreliable US phone carriers) would solve about 99.999% of this.

teh_infallible 3y ago
[flagged]
- NegativeLatency 3y ago
  The dislike is not from the technology itself, but from its current applications and 2nd order effects. Most of which currently have not been great.
- judikidd 3y ago
  Famously user friendly crypto. Where nobody ever loses access to their assets in perpetuity.
- hannob 3y ago
  Yeah, sure. I mean "we don't do fraud detection, it's literally one of our design decisions that you can't do anything after fraud has happened, and also, fraud is kinda in our DNA" systems are totally well suited to solve that.
  - justanorherhack 3y ago
    It's more like you have total agency and the burdens that come with that. To each their own!
  - roenxi 3y ago
    Famously, the optimal amount of fraud is non-zero. We may yet discover that the amount of fraud in crypto is superior to the fiat systems. In COVID times governments noticed that freezing bank accounts was an option. Having systems that cannot be subjected to that is wise; even if it involves high costs.

mgoetzke 3y ago

Same here. While in a Nike Store in London, I could not use my Barclaycard for a 50 EUR purchase. So unheard of to use a Mastercard for purchasing something while on vacation. Used a different card which worked fine. No SMS or notification on my phone to verify myself either. Wrote them a mail to ask what this was about and why I cannot use my card, but they only wrote back that the card was not blocked and everything was fine, but sometimes they are afraid of fraud etc.

avianlyric 3y ago
I’m a little confused, a 50EUR purchase in London, UK? Also which country was the Barclaycard issued in? You’ll probably also find that banks are much twitcher around merchants like Nike and Apple because their products hold value really well, and are easy to sell on the second hand market. Makes those products a really great way to exfiltrate stolen funds because the products are almost as liquid as actual cash.

RockRobotRock 3y ago

90% sure these questions come from Experian/Transunion or something like that. Curious about how these APIs work and how hard it is to get access.

quickthrower2 3y ago

Is this an American thing? I never get a card decline for any purchase on a credit card. Prepaid cards are another matter.

wslh 3y ago
I think so, not an American citizen but travel often to many places and remember Dell cancelling my notebook purchases ~5 times in a day (in two different years) until I call to a sales representative. I share the same experience in Dell with American citizens.
blitzar 3y ago
America and Americans have a much higher predisposition to credit card fraud than the rest of the world.
makeitdouble 3y ago
It's probably on transactions that are requested solely based on the card number, and no PIN. I got hit by these blocks with a EU card a long time ago, as the shop was trying to pass the charge with the magnetic strip. Had to phone to the VISA center to let the charge pass through on next retry. Nowadays I'd assume any "card in the machine" transaction done with a PIN would go through no questions asked, even if you're located in Antarctica on their database.
- mcv 3y ago
  This is the thing that surprises me most about credit cards: you can pay with just the information that's easily visible on the card. And you share that information directly with the merchant. Surely that's a gaping security hole? I'm not surprised they need to be paranoid about fraud, if it's that easy. When I buy something with my bank card, I always have to provide my PIN. If I buy something online, the site redirects me to my bank, where I authenticate myself with my bank's system, and then authorize the payment with my bank's system (involving 2FA), and then the bank tells the site that the payment has been authorized. The site can blindly trust my bank and can immediately ship stuff to me, because the payment will go through. I've never had any blocks nor fraud issues with this system.

Tuna-Fish 3y ago

> I regularly travel for work and it's impossible for me to make any purchases on major sites like Walmart, Best Buy, Target, Costco, etc. They all will accept an order, charge my card, and then randomly cancel the order some hours to days later, and refund me. These sites are not cancelling your orders. The card-issuing bank is. If you have persistent trouble, switch banks.

Nextgrid 3y ago
Disagreed, the banks aren't cancelling it - they wouldn't authorize the transaction in the first place. Chances are, the banks are correctly returning an address verification mismatch if you didn't use your true billing address. Most likely the stores are cancelling the orders because of billing/delivery address mismatch or (if you didn't set a different billing address) that it doesn't verify against your card.
- nucleardog 3y ago
  Or, in the case of one particularly annoying site I tried to order from--a name mismatch. The site was clear upfront that everything had to match EXACTLY or they would cancel the order. I logged in to my online banking and copy and pasted my debit card details to make sure there were no issues. The one thing I didn't think to copy and paste was my own name because, I mean, I know my own name, right? Apparently not as I'd entered "John Public" and to my surprise my debit card was issued to "John Q Public".
  - justsomehnguy 3y ago
    And here are I am who always writes %BANK NAME% and it works. Though my bank always demand 3DSecure.

alemanek 3y ago

I have been traveling internationally continuously for 6 years and haven’t had any of these issues. I use Schwab, Capital One, and Chase for banks and credit cards. I don’t stay any one place longer than 6 months; usually just 3months in a country. When my bank card expired Schwab even overnighted a new card to Peru for me. I order from Amazon a fair amount and don’t have any issues. Maybe you are in this weird algorithmic grey zone where you don’t travel enough so everything gets flagged. Where for me I have been traveling for so long that nothing gets flagged.

Spunkie 3y ago
I've been traveling issue free for a long long time before these things started happening. It's really only in the last couple of years it's become a problem. Also I don't have issues with classic eCommerce stores like Amazon, Newegg, B&H, ebay. It's only the new wave of eCommerce stores trying to enter the market this decade, like all the big box stores. It's like they all got sold the same crap anti-fraud software/service.