On Sun, 21 Dec 2014 01:46:28 -0500, Someone Else
wrote:

Wayne.B wrote:
On Fri, 19 Dec 2014 21:25:47 -0500, Someone Else
wrote:

Mr. Luddite wrote:
On 12/18/2014 4:43 PM, Tim wrote:
My wife is ditching her debit card. It's been "compromised " three
times this year. She has several automatic payments coming out of her
account monthly, and has to contact her accounts and switch stuff
over and has had to do this several times.

I won't have a debit card.


Banks heavily push their debit cards, credit cards, on-line banking
and auto deposit/payments systems. I think they should be 100 percent
responsible for any screw-ups or hacks of their software security that
results in theft of funds or identity.

I've had a few instances of fraud with my personal and company cards
over the years and they never charged me a dime. Bank of America,
Chase, and CitiBank - all the same.

It has been annoying to be declined in Las Vegas, for example, for a $40
purchase. I had to call the bank and verify it. They said I didn't
tell them I was leaving town so I told them I didn't think they needed
my itinerary and they could see I travel often. That was the first and
last time that happened with any credit card. They have some odd
procedures for determining what might be fraud.

SE
===

It's always annoying to get declined. It happens to us all the time
when we cruise to the Caribbean even though we give them plenty of
advanced notice what are plans are, and frequently purchase thousands
of dollars worth of diesel fuel. Diesel is not usually the problem,
more often a relatively minor purchase in a store. We just switch to
another card for a few days and make the obligatory phone calls to get
it straightened out. The banks's fraud control systems are programmed
to recognize certain patterns of usage which have been associated with
problems in the past and it's not always obvious just what triggered
the alert.
I can't blame them for looking out for fraud but I've had some strange
situations where I would charge $2000 one day at a store and get the
security decline the next day for $20 in the same county. Their
computers must be programmed to flag fraud but I can't figure out the
methodology behind it.

===

They really don't want you to figure out the methodology either. My
guess, and it's only that, is that there is some sort of weighted risk
analysis score that trips a threshold. I'm sure that the merchant
itself is part of the risk equation since some are not only sloppy but
actually have collusion by employees. Another factor is your buying
history for a given type of merchandise.