Diligent Credit Card Companies

With the security measures credit card companies have in place these days I surprised that anyone is able to get away with credit card scams.

When I was in Thailand I bought some jewelry, I handed over the credit card and a few minutes later the manager of the payment department comes over and says that the card has been rejected and do I have another one. As soon as he said that I knew what the problem was. I had forgotten to tell them I was going to Thailand. All they would have seen was a charge coming in from Thailand and they knew I was in either Canada or Australia. So that was easy enough to straighten out. We just called the company and they put a note on my card saying that any charges from Thailand were being made by me.

A second example occurred yesterday. I bought an ipod. Yeah, I know I finally joined the 21stC. Anyway, I had to order it because none of the stores carry the one I want. So I tried ordering it over the Internet, and website wouldn't accept my order. Because of the credit card. The site required an Aussie address so I put my aussie address in. But when checked against the credit card the addresses didn't match up, so the credit card company wouldn't allow the order to go through, even though they knew that I was in Oz and it was an Aussie purchase. So again it was another call to straighten it out. Although this time I only had to call the toll free number listed on the website and talk to a real person to get it straightened out.

The point of the story is that the credit card companies are so diligent in watching the purchases made by credit card that I'm surprised that people are able to get away with credit card fraud. Although this diligence may be a result of past fraudulent activities, so they are going on hyperoverdrive with their monitoring.