Geezer consumer tip
If you can't find your credit card, it can be a panicky moment. When it happens, I thought the thing to do was call the credit card issuer right away, check for bogus charges, cancel the card, and have a new one sent to you.
You can still do that (though you may not be talking to a real human on the call). But in this modern day, there's an intermediate step you can take. If you have the credit card company's app on your phone, you can probably hit a "lock" or "freeze" button that will shut down the card, but just temporarily. That way, if it turns up within the next few days, you can un-pause it and go on your merry way. Sure beats the muss and fuss (and delay) of a new card and a new account number. The app will also show you all the charges made to the card, pretty much in real time.
I don't know how long this "freeze" action has been an option – fortunately, I rarely have this issue – but like the kids say on the Twitter, "I know this now."
At the Dublin airport I payed the cab driver with my credit card. Somehow, I dropped the card in the cab. Got a note from the cab company. They found the card and cut it up. There are nice people in the world
ReplyDeletePay it forward.
DeleteMy Visa number got stolen and used, twice in quick succession, for about $6k (denied). Bank alerted me. Had to replace since it wasn’t a missing card situation. Replacing is a nuisance, but no worse than that.
ReplyDeletei think the kids are saying, “i was today years old” when i learned this.
ReplyDeleteAs long as they stay off my lawn.
DeleteI used the card freeze thing while I was traveling business in the Bay Area at least going back 6 years when I got a "possible fraudulent transaction" notification. Opened the app, suspended the card, and pushed a button to confirm that transaction wasn't me which automatically started the fraud process. And if I needed to use that card while still traveling, I could just unfreeze it, use the card, and then freeze it again.
ReplyDeleteDidn't have to talk to anybody, and the new card arrived a day or two after I got home.
Would be nice if we just implemented proper chip+PIN payment systems that Europe deployed a decade ago to prevent fraud, but apparently US banks figured that US citizens are too stupid to remember a PIN, even though we all remember PINs and passwords for every other thing we do. Instead we got chip + signature which does absolutely nothing to prevent lost / stolen card fraud.
Proper multi-factor authentication and authorization should use "something you have" (the card) and "something you know" (the PIN) to verify. Instead, we get signatures that nobody ever looks at, and are totally unverifiable and easy to copy.
Well done, US banks! Hundreds of millions of dollars spent deploying chip + PIN terminals, and then not even using the PIN bit while fraud continues unabated.
The freezing of credit cards has existed at least since equalized opportunity credit laws of the 1970s. My mother, who was legally entitled to have her own revolving debt accounts in about 1975, used to keep hers frozen into a block of ice in the freezer for security's sake (security from "capricious use" rather than from loss or theft, I always guessed). I would be surprised if she were the first to do this.
ReplyDelete