BofA keeps freezing my Visa.
I called them in January, telling them since I will be moving 2,300 miles, I expect to spend a lot of money for 3-4 weeks. I have to get a new bed, a new TV, a PS3, a new apartment, pay for moving etc etc. I also asked them to increase my credit card limit, which they easily obliged.
2 weeks later I'm at the checkout at BestBuys with a TV stand and my credit card gets flagged. It's kind of pointless to take it out on the poor BofA operator- she's just doing her job, but I felt somewhat obligated to point out that what might look like a stolen credit card spending spree is actually someone who had to get a whole bunch of new stuff, something I pointed out that I dutifully told them before I moved.
Yesterday I was trying to buy a new camera online and the same Visa card didn't go through.
It makes me wonder to what extent is this standard fraud protection and to what extent is this due to more stringent monitoring as a result of this economy. It's hard for me to imagine that venders would put up with this much obstruction during normal economic times; they don't pay credit card companies 1% of their gross receipt just so their customers can go through this much grief.
The upside is that I'm getting pretty decent deals on everything, as no one else is spending money.
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Mille m...
5 years ago
6 comments:
Yang,
Don't worry too much about it. I had the same thing happen to me when I used personal cards. Company cards are best since they always have such high limits and people don't bother with them until the company questions the charges.
I've also noticed that MasterCard is more flexible with how much you spend a day. I hadn't used a particular card number in a while and I was able to charge over 10G without any problems. Visa however keeps flagging all the new CC#. AmEx is currently the worst since they will profile your ass for shopping at particular stores. So when you get a new batch of CC# you need to make sure they are a few counties apart else the system will pegged you.
BTW, what TV did you get. The 42 inch LCD or the 47 inch Samsung. Personally I always get Samsung, they're easier to pass.
You know, I had the same thing happen to me (@!$#&? Visa cards) - I notified the cc co. that I was going on a vacation and strange charges from another country may appear on my card. They of course froze my card after my first purchase on my vacation. This SAME company, however, let thousands of dollars of strange purchases from all over the world (Australia one day, London the next, and I believe Singapore and Canada on the same day) go unflagged! I had to fight to get the charges removed, replace the card, etc. Morons, I must say (I should note that I have a FICO over 800 and cash accounts up the wazoo from being a prudent & responsible saver so... these buttwipes should want to have good customers like you & me).
For a while I used my Mastercard to automatically pay for my monthly Charter cable bill. So I never paid attention to it. Then I receive a disconnection notice from the cable company because my payment was past due. Apparently Mastercard's fraud protection system flagged it as a suspicious charge. And of course Charter, being the well run cable company they are, invoked the suspicion by first charging $1 to the card first then changing the amount later. And once the charges didn't go through, they never warned me about it. So I had to call Charter and fight the late charges, which was an adventure. Experiences like these made me not wanting cable ever again.
I know my FICO is around 780 give or take, so I'm not worried about credit profile. The problem with, well, my industry, is that these datamining tools people like me write are good at crunching data but not so good at excerising common sense. What they should do but apparently have not is to have manual overrides if you call them up and say "Don't freak if you see transactions coming out of Barbados".
I ended up getting a 42' TV. The big limiting factor was not price, but whether I can fit it into my CRV :-)
As for my goofy cable TV story. I just got comcast installed and I was asked to put up a deposit. I didn't think much of it until I got a letter from them saying that they asked for a deposit because of my credit score. I was thinking to myself- If I'm getting flagged, then so are the vast majority of your customers. You might as well save some money and not run the credit check and demand a deposit from everyone.
I like how you included a PS3 in the stuff you needed to buy. "I have to get a new bed, a new TV, a PS3, a new apartment, pay for moving etc etc." Hahah, made me laugh. I love it.
That's what happens when you don't have adult supervision :-)
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