Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

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>We had one payment blocked by Radar due to it being from a "high risk location"

This, to me, represents the worst that banking fraud protection has to offer. Just yesterday I (from the USA) tried to purchase a software license for a tool I've been using the free version of for a long time. My card was declined, so I used my American Express. About two hours later, I got a call from my bank's fraud department saying they had blocked a transaction to the UK for fraud prevention, and disabled my card to protect me. Apparently the bank (a small US-based bank) block any transaction in the UK as it's a "high risk country"... I'm sorry, but this is the Internet. No one cares where the company is located, and I have no way of knowing beforehand that the payment is processed by Stripe US or Stripe UK. Blocking entire countries for fraud prevention is a really lazy way of doing fraud prevention.

But I've even seen worse at another bank. My area of the US doesn't have Publix grocery stores. Apparently this bank considered shopping at Publix to be unacceptable risk when I was traveling for work, and disabled my debit card because of this. Stopping at Walgreens beforehand and getting dinner the night before wasn't suspicious though.

Bank fraud is a hard problem, and taking lazy solutions doesn't solve that problem. It just hurts customers and hurts businesses.

This reminds me of Bank of America and Air Canada. I used to fly to Canada every week for work and every week my card would be declined by BoA when I tried to book on AirCanada.com.

I had it down to a science, I knew the direct number to their fraud dept and I knew when I should place my call so that I'd usually be connected at just the right time to get the charge authorized with enough time to avoid the website session from timing out, although sometimes I'd have to start over. Eventually, air canada added a timeout popup which helped prevent this.

I tried everything to get BoA to fix this (escalating calls, writing letters, etc). By the end, I gave up and just accepted it when they "put a note" on my account so this "would never happen again". This went on for over 2 years. Thankfully my company switched our cards to another bank and I never had this problem again.

Heh. My bank did something right, and my yearly $AUS payment to Fastmail finally went through without getting flagged by the automated systems.

Alas, a human also saw the transaction, failed to read the note or look in the history and locked the card up anyway.

Fastmail charges you in AUD? Weird, I know it's an Australian company but I paid for service earlier this month and was charged in USD. And I'm not misinterpreting the "$" as a USD-only sign, the invoice literally says "USD".

(I work for FastMail) We charge in USD, but the payment is processed in Australia. For some reason, American banks often block all payments processed outside of the USA; it's like they haven't heard of the concept of the internet and global trade…

We don't see this problem with banks in any other country (not do I ever have the problem in reverse, buying goods and services from foreign websites with my Australian credit card).

Working in information security, I see this a lot in security practices for US companies. The client says "let's block all traffic from outside the US" because they don't do business outside the US. Then come to find out they have contractors in India... and a partner datacenter in Singapore, and oh yeah their factory in China. And now the CEO is on vacation in Costa Rica and can't get on the VPN. And oh shit, there's the field office at one of their suppliers in the UK.

I say this as an American who has never lived outside the US but who deals with international clients regularly: the US seems uniquely inclined (in my experience) to think that everything they need falls within their borders, and everything outside their borders should be treated with suspicion. I've never had a German client want to block all traffic from South Africa. That's just an observation, I make no judgements as to why that is.

I did have an American university for a client who said "we cannot block or otherwise discriminate traffic from anywhere, since we have students or staff in every country outside of North Korea" which is a refreshing outlook IMO.

Do you know if this mainly a Visa/Mastercard issue or does this affect American Express as well? The latter isn't a network of banks and seems to be less restrictive towards international payments, but I could be wrong.

FWIW, I paid with AMEX (using Stripe not PayPal) and it went through right away.

No, you have it right. They charge me in USD and I pay in USD but, as nmjenkins says, the payment is processed in AUS-the-country, though not AUS-the-currency. Sorry for the confusion.

For what it is worth, Fastmail has been as good as they can be with this issue, but they're at the mercy of my bank as much as I am.

I had something similar happen a few years ago when I bought a ReSharper license and had to call the bank to reassure them that JetBrains is a reputable company. I found it odd that they blocked the transaction based on location (Czech Republic) alone instead of bothering to do any research whatsoever into individual vendors. It would have taken them all of 30 seconds on Google to realize JetBrains should be whitelisted.

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