[ale] Ouch. Stay away from proprietary technology.

[Sean Kilpatrick]

Last May we were traveling (towing a small camping trailer) and stopped
for a few minutes at a McDonalds in the middle of nowhere, Virginia, to
use the wifi to confirm our next campground reservation.  (I know
better, I really do, but it was early in the morning and nothing else
was open.) Within minutes three or four $1 charges appeared on our
credit card account from gas stations followed within minutes by
significant charges in Atlanta and Dallas.  Fortunately, the "fuzzy
logic" at Chase immediately put a hold on the account.

We discovered we had a "problem" when we tried to purchase gas 50 miles
further down the road.  Called Chase and got to the"fraud control"
monkey (Bangalore?) who knew about as much about U.S. geography as I do
about India's.  That is, looking at the account he had no clue how far
apart are Dallas and Atlanta. Escalated.  Got bogus charges revoked. But
this is our major credit card (all utilities and most other routine
charges hit the account) so we couldn't just use another card for the
next four months while we (slowly) headed to Tacoma.

So, escalated again.

Got a new card number. Had new cards shipped to the first Chase bank
branch we would pass (in Tulsa, OK). Then spent hours in the next town
with a library contacting the utilities, et al, and giving them our new
card number.

For what it's worth, I give kudos to Chase Bank's efforts to combat
credit card fraud through sophisticated software that sensed a problem
within minutes -- even though we had placed a "travel alert" on the
account.

And, no, we do not have any debit cards. Too risky.

Sean


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On Sun, 2016-02-07 at 23:51 -0500, Scott Castaline wrote:
> Back in 2009 I had a similar situation happen to me. At the time Iwe 
> didn't have any credit cards so this happened to my debit card. I had 
> been down in Tampa and I had no problems until I got back home. I had 
> filled the rental car with gas before turning it using that card with no 
> problem. My wife picks me up at the airport and I filled our van up with 
> gas again using the same card. We get over to Kroger's I went to pick up 
> a prescription from the pharmacy and got declined. At first didn't think 
> anything of and used my wife's card no problem. Later I go to use my 
> card again to check out at Krogers and was declined again even when they 
> entered the card info manually. I called the bank (then it was ING 
> Direct and is now Capital One 360) and they didn't know why but my card 
> had been frozen. As it turned out it was the company that handled their 
> clearing and approvals, that company informed us that between the time 
> that I got gas and then the first declined attempted there were 5 credit 
> requests totaling $30,000 that were very far apart from each other in 
> Mexico at the same time. So all charges were declined and my card was 
> frozen. A week later I got a new card.
> 
> Nine months later, I had made it a daily practice to go online with my 
> banks and one morning I see several charges totaling $5,000 on my new 
> card. This time I had to do all the leg work to resolve the issues. The 
> worst part was that night I several bills scheduled which didn't happen 
> and by the time I got it straightened out I was late an several of them 
> getting clobbered with late fees. All but one merchant wound up 
> canceling the orders, Champion Sports was very quick to ship out the 
> order with in 2 hours, but did credit my account. Then I did mange to 
> get the late fees waived after several phone calls and getting escalated 
> to upper management gophers. Fortunately we were able to re-establish 
> our credit and then had a couple of credit cards and stopped using the 
> debit card immediately.
> 
> Now it seems almost like clock work every 9 months we're getting fraud Z0nz!D1df
> alerts on one of our cards so we don't have card numbers long enough to 
> expire. At one time we had 2 cards locked at about the same time, and 
> that was just in the last 6 months.