Considering the growing amount of credit card fraud, it’s not surprising that banks are becoming more and more vigilant about identifying suspicious transactions. It’s too bad they haven’t been as successful at filtering out false positives or promptly notifying customers, as James Fallows at The Atlantic recently discovered when he got his account frozen for sending files to his Kindle.
“Maybe Amazon and Visa should talk?” [The Atlantic]
(Photo: TheTruthAbout…)
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Amazon might do well to use the Apple method of charging micropayments; they bundle 24 hours’ worth of purchases into one charge.
@juri squared: They do something like that for mp3 downloads-I’ve purchased three in short order and only saw one $2.67 charge (0.89×3)
@juri squared: I didn’t know Apple did that, but that’s what a commenter on The Atlantic’s site also mentioned.
It might also help if Visa made a note that Amazon/Kindle fees are in the “legit” category of micro-payments.
@juri squared: Upon closer inspection, it looks like they did. He converted pdf’s-$0.15/ea. The charges are for $0.45 and $0.30 on two separate days-looks like they bundled three together one day, then two the next.
@juri squared: Apple prob. does this to save on CC fees. At $.99 a song, a $.10+ transaction fee and 2%+ fee can add up.
@CompyPaq: All the pricings can be different for different industries/volume. Some merchants might see a trans fee, some might have a flat discount rate, etc. For a company as big as apple I would imagine they’re paying as low as $0.04 per transaction or less than 0.08% per transaction. Either way you hack it it’s going to be uber low compared to a ma and pa merchant because of the insane amount of volume.
@juri squared: Apple licensed that technology from… wait for it… Amazon.
@Michael Belisle: Ooops. Copy/paste fail.
Apple licenses Amazon’s 1-Click [CNET]
@Michael Belisle: That’s one click purchase. That is not the concept of merging multiple individual purchases in one day into one charge/bill.
@silver-bolt: Merging multiple items into a single order is a subset of “One-Click”.
From the perspective of the credit card company, just because these small charges are coming from Amazon does not necessarily mean that they must be automatically legit.
Someone might’ve very well have opened an Amazon account and used a stolen credit card to make tiny charges as a means of validating the credit card number.
Amazon might very well have their own internal controls designed to detect fraudulent activity, and Amazon might claim that they vet their sign-ups, and if a charge comes out of Amazon it means that it passed their anti-fraud check, but individual credit card issues are not obligated to just take Amazon’s word for it.
If you pay your credit card off in hundreds of $1 electronic bill pay installments, though, you’re all set.
@Laura Northrup: i see what you did there
@Laura Northrup: I love going to sleep at night knowing that I’ve done my part to shore up the financial industry’s bottom line!
Afterall, what’s $5,000?
typically the fraudsters like to run small auths or even charges through legit companies (especially common ones) to test out card numbers they get. I work for a credit card fraud department, and these dudes blow up Itunes and MobileMe. A large portion of the auths for those turn out to be fraudulent test auths. I’m sure those amazon ones are next.
For anyone who wants to avoid this, you can purchase a gift card and attach it to your one click account on Amazon. That way the credit card only sees one (relatively) large purchase. On the plus side this also works to help keep a budget. That one-click is evil…
I wish Itunes also triggered fraud alerts on my visa.
They stole $20 from me for a .99 cent app.
All this fraud and still they reject chip and pin. So, how long until the banks in the US actually really do something about fraud….. like actually really addressing it instead of passing it along as part of their interest rates?
@Ephraim: Out of curiosity, how exactly is the IC chip more secure than a mag-stripe? I mean, Japan, Korea, and loads of other countries have gone chip+pin (though in Japan swipe+sign is still available on request) so there must be something to it, but what?
@Ephraim: Chip and Pin will not help for online transactions.
I recently had my HSBC debit card start getting declined everywhere. Turns out, there was a hold on it because of a $320 ATM transaction I’d made a few days earlier. In talking with HSBC about why my card wasn’t working, they said their notes showed that they’d tried calling and left messages and sent emails and I hadn’t responded. Because no one had called me or left a message or emailed me (they did have my correct number and email on file).
That’s great that their fraud detection is picking up false positives, but they seem to be slacking on the “letting the customer know so he/she can confirm or deny that it’s fraud” part.
“You can get files converted for the Kindle for free, but it means manually transferring them via your computer. I thought it was worth the seventy-five cents to skip that phase.”
Maybe. But I bet Fallows has used this feature hundreds of times and is too embarrassed to say “Yeah, I am rich and lazy. Sue me.”
I tried to buy something on walmart.com with my visa. It basically forced me to join visa’s cc verification in order to use it, I reluctantly did so and you apparently have to respond to a email they send you before you can use it. I didn’t know this because they didn’t tell you that when you “join” I kept on trying to make the purchase w/my visa which got rejected because I didn’t respond to the email visa sent me. I ended up using my amex to pay and then was called about 6-7 times by visa because they believe that my card was being used for fraudulent purchases. So basically they just prevented me from using their card and missed out on the fee for my purchase, awesome right?
@pixiegirl1: The Verified by Visa system is an absolute joke. I use it so rarely that I forget my password every single time. To reset it the site asks me a couple of pieces of information that are readily available to anyone that is interested in stealing money from me and bam, I’m allowed in. They don’t even make a phone call to attempt to verify identity.
And Verified by Visa is a misnomer: In my case (w/ Chase), it’s “Verified by some guy in his apartment” (maybe) [ambrand.com] . The domain, securesuite.net / securesuite.co.uk have slighty better whois information now, but it’s still suspicious as all hell.