I found this useful when I was wondering about a charge that I wasn't expecting pop up. I logged into the card issuer's online portal and found that it was something I care about, but simply forgot it was pending. Though if it was a fraudulent charge, I could've just gave them a ring. It certain can help in noticing fraudulent transactions in a much shorter time frame than simply waiting for a statement.
Edit: Actually, I mis-remembered. Internet charges on the Amex do cause a notification. But not for any of the other cards.
You can configure that amount in the online settings; change it to $0 and you'll get an alert for every transaction.
Seeing as you have 60 days after posting to dispute a charge, immediate notification seems like overkill.
I could see the usefulness for subscriptions or to shutdown a shopping spree before it gets out of hand I guess.
It's often much more than 60 days.
We had a chargeback at work that was a couple months over a year old. That surprised me...I had thought that a year was the limit.
That's not actually the most surprising thing I learned about credit cards last year, though. We got a notification from the payment processor near the end of the year that a charge from March had been reported as a success but actually failed. By "reported as a success" I do not just mean that the API had reported success on the charge. The payment processor had also reported later that it had successfully settled. They just never actually transferred any money to us.
While talking to them on the phone the payment processor rep then told me that the same thing had happened on the charges on this customer's monthly subscription for all subsequent months.
According to the payment processor rep, the customer had told his bank that he no longer wanted our service (but neglected to tell us...). The card was still good, and so the bank still said "approved" when we would try to charge it, then would apparently later notice that the customer did not want the charge and somehow arrange to block settlement, and the payment processor apparently has no way to report this.
Notice how messed up this is: you can put through a charge on a credit card, have the issuing bank and payment processor tell you it went through, have it settle according to the payment processor, have it show up as successfully settled in all reports from the payment processor...but the money just doesn't show up.
Unless the payment processor tells you about this, the only hint you'll have that something is wrong is that there will be a discrepancy between what is supposed to have shown up in your bank account and what actually showed up, and you won't have any way to tell which charge is the one that silently failed.
Do you mind if I ask who the processor was?
I'd prefer not to name the processor since I suspect that the same problem could happen at any processor when dealing with cards from that issuing bank so I don't want to drag the processor's name through the mud.
A) you want me to type my pin into a compromised device, the pinpad at the pump
B) you expect me to remember seven pins, I carry seven credit cards (yes that's excessive) and each should have a separate pin for security, right?
Ex of a simple and secure system. cc shows transaction cost, user clicks ok on the card. Card digitally signs a transaction with time stamp, vender ID, and amount.
Want safe online transactions, add a USB dongle or Bluetooth.
But it won't save you from a compromised point-of-sale system that lies to you about how much you're paying or which commits fraudulent transactions while the card is still in the reader.
Now, if only we carried around a device that included a display and some sort of input mechanism, plus a near-distance communication chip...
(Ok, if the device is a general computing device, a special secure operation mode might be needed for this sort of use case, one which can't be subverted by normally installed software, but still...)
Now people will complain that "the app doesn't run on their rooted, bootloader unlocked, jailbroken phones"
I mean, you can mod the brakes on your car if you really want to, at your own risk. What is a bit strange is when your media player can affect your brakes without you even noticing. Same principle here, less lives on the line.
If you're not going to do chip and PIN (and you should), why not just chip and nothing?
Thankfully we've now got chip & pin, completely removing the need for minimum wage retail staff to verify ownership of credit cards.
NPR's Planet Money recently did a story on the signature in CC payments. The answer seems to be "not really".
"Today on the show: the signature. It's supposed to say, "This is me." But where did the idea come from? And why are we still using it? We consult a rabbi, a lawyer and a credit card executive."
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/08/29/344034815/episo...
(It wasn't NFC exactly, but similar technology)
In this case, when all five banks decided to go to pin-enabled credit cards, they just did it. Retailers were given a certain amount of time to switch over, “or else.” There are few alternatives, so the entire country moved forward.
Whereas, south of the 49th parallel, there is all kinds of competition for credit cards and for merchant services, so if a few banks don’t feel like sending out cards with chips an PINs, they don’t. And if a few retailers don’t want to go to the expense of upgrading their systems, they don’t have to.
On the flip side... There is nearly zero Apple Pay up here.
Some one has demoed a proof of concept system that you could hide in a back pack and walk through a crowded train/tube station and harvest small sums from hundreds of people.