Hacker News Reader

Comment by giardini | Hacker News Reader

I found that notifying my providers of upcoming moves eliminates this. Call them, tell them what you're doing and ask their advice (b/c there may be something you overlooked or they may have special problems of their own).

Anyway, they're doing you a service and notifying them is good etiquette. And like good etiquette, it often greases the wheels of commerce.

View on HN

Note that this is about large tech service providers “taking this into their own hands.” The basic problem is that a lot of these companies deal with people who store their card information and then use an insecure password or so, or reuse the password at a different website... Someone else gets into the account and requests a transaction to a new address.

Also fun story about how your advice doesn't always work, I was locked out from my money multiple times on my honeymoon in Greece despite repeated calls to the bank, repeated unlockings of said account, “hi I am actually standing at an ATM in this bank branch, can we track this account lockup in real time?”... I think with all of the time on hold I actually might have spent something like 20+ hours in the trip trying to debug it over the several times it happened.

When we finally resolved it, I'm not 100% sure about the explanation, but it was something like “the person you called a week ago put in country code GE for Georgia rather than GR for Greece, and that is the first place everybody else who has serviced your request has probably looked, but they all probably thought GE was right because you have to memorize that DE is Germany and so people get confused real easily...”

That does help a bit with the banks, but I've not had any luck at all with the stores who cancel my orders after the payment goes through. They refuse to budge, assuming I even get a response, and won't give me any information about why my orders are cancelled, citing more vague security reasons.

I did have success with a privacy.com card once, at a store that cancelled orders from all of my other cards. I'm guessing they see it as a prepaid card and can't get as much info on those.

Neither my bank nor my credit card company even want pre-notification at this point and don't provide a way to do it at this point. I admittedly haven't had issues either internationally or in the US for quite a few years at this point, but I always carry a varied set of credit cards when traveling.

Stores are not payment processors and don’t want to be due to compliance reasons. You’d have to ask who is processing their payments and contact those people and have the store also contact them most likely and that still doesn’t mean you’ll get anything done.

The way the incentives work, if a store is mostly sure you're legit, that's not good enough and they would lose money if they served people indistinguishable from you; if their margins aren't huge, even being 90% sure may not be good enough.

When I worked at a bank, I heard that the travel notifications weren't actually used by the fraud department at all and were just there as window dressing to make the customer feel better.

Having to contact the provider to spend one's own money is simply outrageous.

And yet, I also have started to make preemptive contact with them to avoid the complete hassle of having the card blocked for fraud that is NOT fraud.

If you were talking about asking someone’s permission to surfs your own cash money, that would be outrageous.

A bank account or a credit card is a relationship where you rent someone else’s infra to make payments. Makes sense to work together to minimise friction for both parties.

If you’re free to be scammed out of your money, with no repercussions to others, sure it’s unreasonable to stop you. But with (American) credit cards, it’s the backing financial institution that bears the burden of fraud; merchants accepting fraudulent transactions are punished as well.

> I found that notifying my providers of upcoming moves eliminates this.

you seem to be older. I used this too. Until 5 or so years ago. Now my bank just says i "don't have to notify them anymore as they don't have this in the system, since it is all automated for my convenience"

Not so much. Many credit unions, including mine, still seem to require it (and absolutely have flagged transactions and our cards when we've forgotten).

But yes, none of my credit cards (Chase, Citi, Amex) require (or even offer) travel notifications.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com