2009-09-30

Card fraud protection is not protecting ME

As expected, one of my cards has got blocked this holiday by a bank's fraud protection.

OK, I can understand why they do it. But I wish they would be honest about it. I spoke to my bank manager and he said they can turn this off but then I would not have any fraud protection on my card.

What they seem to forget is that is someone pretends to be me and convinces them to part with money it is the bank that have been defrauded and not me. Any inconvenience I suffer is a side effect of that and down to the bank's gullibility. Nobody fooled me or lied to me - someone fooled the bank. I was not involved.

What winds me up even more is that when it is me that is defrauded, e.g. when some company failed to put through a refund, the bank were not interested in helping at all.

They are protecting themselves at significant inconvenience to me.

Now, if they did send transactions and authorisations as they happen then I could tell them if their was any fraudulent activity when it happens. They could even have a query mechanism by some means to double check any they thought were suspect. A little bit of sensible use of technology would avoid all of this inconvenience.

3 comments:

  1. My bank's favourite trick is to block the card on a friday afternoon without telling me, then when I'm stuck in a store on saturday unable to pay, tell me I'll have to wait until monday to sort it out.

    This is only sligtly mitigated by the fact that when they block the card it still works on ATMs - so much for their 'protection'.

    There was also the time that the fraud dept. denied all knowledge of blocking the card, and I was without one for 3 weeks because they couldn't work out why it didn't work and eventually gave up and issued a new one.

    I hate banks.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mitchell & Webb Sound - Identity Theft http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E

    ReplyDelete
  3. Fraud protection controls and passwords are so complicated that they defeat their objects. I have over 20 different accounts I need to access. Some force regular password changes, others don’t allow the same password to be used more than once, some require upper/lower case plus numbers in their passwords. There are so many different permutations that the only way to avoid having a password reset (a security problem in itself) is to write the passwords down – a security breach in itself.

    ReplyDelete

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