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Comment by hart_russell | Hacker News Reader

I had someone buy $200 worth of jeans 800 miles away from my home a few months ago... for some reason Visa did not find that suspicious. I was smart enough to thoroughly read my statement that month and dispute that charge.

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In all honesty, that sounds reasonable for a holiday purchase.

Yeah, but if transaction 1 is in person (card present) in your home area, then transaction 2 is card present 800 miles away in a short amount of time, shouldn't that raise a flag somewhere?

If that's the case then sure, but it probably isn't. People who still use cash for small purchases probably use their bank card two or three times a week at most. That "short amount of time" is likely to be days. And that's just for people who use one card; anyone with more than one card could go for weeks between transactions on a particular card.

Even then, if I telephone a business on the other side of the country and order something over the phone then the transaction will originate hundreds of miles from where I am. You don't need to be physically present when your card is used. There are many scenarios where a card could appear to move around the country (or world) while still actually being legitimate transactions.

I don't know about Visa, but Mastercard called me on more than several occasions. Yes, a real phone call, whether it was me that just purchased this and that item and if they should let the payment go. This happened when I was travelling around Europe. Many times the seller was also blown up by the promptness of the call, sometimes like 20 seconds after the swipe.

After some time, the MC system seems to have learned my patters and also coordinated with other data. For example, I bought a ticket to US with the same card. No single call on any purchase over there. They knew I was in US and most probably the shopping was legit.

With Chase, and probably others, you can have them send an SMS message for every purchase. It is really helpful for discovering fraud.

With simple I get push notifications :-)

IDK, unless you were using the card in your home location a few minutes prior, that wouldn't look too suspicious to me. 800 miles is flyable in only a couple of hours.

Tell it to google...

At some clothing stores that's one pair of jeans.

You can call the credit card provider and have your card locked down to just your state, etc.

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