Do you know how to freak a Mother out?

When your daughter what’s app’s you from South Africa and says she can’t use her credit card.

I immediately call the bank, who first gives me grief because the card is in my daughter’s name and my Husband’s and I’m not on there. Doesn’t matter that I’m on the other credit card with this same bank…

So I’m simultaneously arguing and trying to get my husband on a three way call with the bank, because I’m not sure if I should try his cell or his work landline, and praying the customer service guy doesn’t hang up on me before the call goes through…

Finally get my husband who authorizes me to act on his behalf…

To have customer service say that they didn’t deny any charge…

so I ask how could my daughter be trying to buy something and not have it go through…

to which customer service replies have her try again…

And I’m like, let me repeat…my daughter is in South Africa which is kinda sorta halfway around the world…

Then they look again and say that oh- maybe they did deny something…

At which I explode, and remind them that on a certain date a week ago I called and said that my daughter would be traveling in South Africa and customer service replied that I didn’t need to preauthorize travel expenditures…

And they asked my why my daughter was buying five tickets to a rugby game…

They said there was no history of this card ever being used to buy tickets to a rugby game so it was flagged…

So while I get that it looked like “unusual activity”, if you are visiting South Africa for the first time you might want to check out a sport that is very popular there…

Which is what I told them…

And they righted the error and my daughter had no trouble with her card after that…

So the question is, with all the fraud in the world, how do we keep things secure without screwing us up?

58 thoughts on “Freak Out”

  1. I have that same trouble each time I buy something from an unknown retailer online. And unknown is pretty much anything that isn’t “amazon” or one of those giant stores. Each time a purchase is denied, I have to call the bank, authorize the purchase, and then go back and try again. It’s very annoying.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

    1. That’s happened to me too. It’s hard to complain, like I said last week about airport security, though it’s certainly annoying. What worries me abroad is that we might not have our phones on if the bank tries to contact us

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  2. I haven’t had any issues with my card while traveling, but my cc company did send me an alert about “suspicious activity” after a charge for a toll road came up twice in one day. You know, there and back again…. They weren’t bothered by the plane tickets or the hotel or the rental car, but that toll road was apparently dodgy

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  3. Since I travel so very rarely I always notify both CC and my bank (different entities) so they don’t freak out and deny something. As I’ve never been overseas I can just imagine going and having everything denied. Sort of a nightmare I could obsess about and ruin the entire point of going in the first place.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    2. Great question, that has been with us, without an answer, for a while. I remember an old commercial, from maybe 20 years ago where a guy said that he’s always been a t-shirt and jeans kind of guy. Finally he found a girl that didn’t mind that, they decided to get married. He bought a tux. He got a call. Not from his mom. Not from his best man. It was from his credit card, wanting to know why a t-shirt and jeans kind of guy buys a tux, or in your daughter’s case, goes to a rugby game 🙂

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

      1. I understand the algorithms that flag things…however…sometimes the actions of humans can’t be quantified

        Like

  6. What is the craziest is that the bank wouldn’t authorize you for your husband. I bet they would’ve let him authorize to speak on your behalf. Banks are scared of everything!
    I have a bank story…Since I’ve been in treatment I’m only using one main credit card. It simplifies things for me since I’m on strong medication now and get confused easily. Just about everything is auto deducted to make life easier for me. Well my new card was supposed to be delivered in May but I never received it. That card was attached to my Prime, Netflix and many other companies. I reported to my bank that I never got my new card and to please resend it. They refused saying they’d send me a new card and would close out my old one. What a nightmare! I had to reset everything to the new card and my Netflix was canceled and when I set it back up the discount I had was gone. I was charged a late fee on some things, Amazon declined to send me orders saying my card had expired. My PayPal account was penalized for an expired card etc. All because somebody didn’t send me my new updated card in time. Because I live in a condo community I have a key for my mail so it’s unlikely my card was stolen. It just wasn’t sent. But the bank closed down the card and it took more than two weeks for them to send a new one. It was so annoying! I set up an Apple Card now to use as a backup in case something like this happens again.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. They are so wary of fraud they immediately shut the card down. It’s ridiculous. We only use two credit cards, so it’s a nightmare if it happens..

      Like

      Reply

  7. We’ve had this happen when we went one state over. I get that someone once stole our info and used it in Pennsylvania, but I’m not sure that means I should get flagged when I try to buy lunch at Wendy’s less than 100 miles from my house.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  8. The problem is you’re not dealing with people who are permitted to think laterally, you’re dealing with an AI identifying patterns.

    That aside – I hope your daughter enjoys/enjoyed the rugby game – great place to watch the game. Love to hear her view of how it compares with your football.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  12. I was at a scrapbook expo one year and was making multiple purchases from different vendors – Mastercard called me to verify the charges. I am always thankful when they do that. Frustrating in your circumstances.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  13. I don’t know LA. It’s like they keep protecting the wrong people from fraud. When I lost my debit card in Rotterdam, the lady actually asked me if I called the number on the back of the card to report it stolen. Then, they actually let the transactions go through that were fraudulent. Then, they made me wait a month, only to ask me a series of questions via the fraud department to ensure that it was ME who was committing fraud.

    Anywho, glad it worked out.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Yeah how can you can the number if you don’t have the card ? Although in a situation like that maybe you should put card phone numbers in your phone, unless you lose your phone too.

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

    2. Sorry…didn’t mean to hit send was trying to erase…it’s ridiculous that a human doesn’t look at the flag before an alert goes out. I guess there’s not that many employees…but there’s got to be a better way

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  16. Ugh – this happened to my son when he was in Asia. The bank knew he was there and canceled the card anyway. I made them overnight the new card to Asia – which still takes 2+ days. Fortunately I was on his bank account so I could force the issue. So frustrating…

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

      1. Yeah, he was getting a bullet train with no money. Fortunately he had a few friends at his destination that loaned him some $$ until we got it straightened out, plus his dad had given him an AmEx for emergencies. Ugh – not a fun life lesson…

        Liked by 1 person

  17. We had a credit card company that insisted we keep them informed of any out of state travel and even then they would contact us if things seemed out of the ordinary before they authorized a purchase; then they suddenly changed it to not wanting to know of any travel. From the comments above, it sounds like lots of your readers have had problems revolving around these issues. This is so like the TSA rules, voting laws, and the Covid health orders among other policies to “protect” us. They keep changing and vary from place to place. It is hard to have confidence in any of them.

    Like

    Reply

  18. That’s my worst nightmare come true. I’m so happy that it was resolved. I totally get credit card security, yet I think sometimes these banks go too far. It gives me anxiety just reading this….

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  19. When my daughter was 18 she and a girlfriend went to Thailand. I was working with a Communications Company at the time so purchased a card with $200 worth of talk time “anywhere in the world”. Of course, it didn’t work in Thailand, as we discovered. So I logged a formal complaint through work. Guess what? Employees are unable to log complaints.
    I resigned from that company and moved on elsewhere, but not good enough as I thought I was protecting my daughter.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  20. You sure deal with a lot of grief. Ya know it’s probably not the only time she used her card and they didn’t red flag the first purchase, no they red flagged a multiple purchase. Perhaps customer service needs an overhaul. Perhaps companies should stop outsourcing customer service.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. It wasn’t the first or only time. She’d used it before which was frustrating. I’m guessing because it was multiple tickets, but still…when you go to an event you probably go with others and one guys the tickets. Life however is messy and complicated and often gives us grief. We just keep moving. Then blog about it

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

  21. You know I find it so odd as to how credit card companies pick and choose “suspicious” purchases. My husband and I will get flagged from time to time, however we have had our credit card number stolen twice and the purchases went through. Each time it was well over $500 and for purchases that we would never make.
    So sorry this happened to y’all and your daughter while being so far from home.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. I admit that my credit card company has caught fraud every single time fir the past five or so years. I do applaud their systems…however…sometimes a human needs to be involved

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  23. The line between safety and incompetent is very thin indeed. Reminds me of the time we went to Europe, and we called our Visa card provider three times to try to get the PIN number we were told you needed to use any credit card in Europe. Three times, the customer service rep assured us that the card had no PIN and it wasn’t necessary. Of course, the first time we tried to make a purchase in Germany with the card, we were told that they couldn’t accept the card without a PIN.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s