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Comment by samontar | Hacker News Reader

That’s anti-fraud to stop someone from stealing your card and using it elsewhere. You can usually pre-empt that by informing the bank of travel.

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Anti-fraud may been the reason on that day, but who knows what will be the reason tomorrow (eg Capital Controls as it happened in Greece). The main point is that I still had to get permission. It's kind of like when I was a kid, I wasn't allowed to go outside the house unless I informed my parents, which was like getting permission implicitly.

When using cash, you do not have to inform the bank anything.

No you have to visit a money exchanger in advance, exchange some money into local currency, then go to your destination.

Which...is the same thing you need to do anyway to use your card in China.

If you're in the US or Europe, you'll probably get a better rate by exchanging cash into local currency at your destination.

For me, it’s always been cheapest to use an ATM at my destination, and let my bank do the currency conversion instead of using the rate offered by the ATM. My bank charges me something like max(5€, 1%), which is usually substantially cheaper than all the other options. I think this is more or less the same (or cheaper) for all German banks.

Almost all UK banks charge 2.75% above the visa/mc wholesale rate for overseas transactions. Plus they usually charge 1%-1.5% for overseas ATM transactions.

This is so prevalent that it's common for new banks (or existing banks doing a push for their new current account) to offer commission-free overseas spending. But many of them have pulled the 'perk' after they've gained a large enough customer base. If I recall correctly, at least Halifax, Nationwide and Metro Bank have in the past offered accounts with no commission on overseas card transactions, and then changed the terms to the standard (2.25%-2.75%) after 1-3 years.

Anti-fraud is done for the bank's benefit, with little incentive to prevent false positives. In my own experience, 100% of my blocked transactions have been false over the last few years (since I moved out of the US, where fraud is more rampant). It's extremely annoying - it's my money, but I can't use it because the bank is being overly conservative.

100% of fraudulent transactions have gone through silently on my card. Despite the fact that many times my bank has sent me an SMS querying whether something was kosher. Doubly perplexing because they were OS hotel and airline charges, I had a stream of local transactions (fuel, supermarket), I very rarely pay hotels directly, and the bank makes it easy to tell them you are going OS.

After much drama they refunded me. The hotel didn't seem to even care -- presumably they were not getting a huge charge back. IDK if it was a 'card not present' or what. They couldn't even tell me the name of the person using my card -- privacy rules.

Maybe switch banks? My experience is I've had my account blocked exactly once - and that turned out to be actual identity theft. In the end, I didn't permanently lose any money thanks to the system working as intended. On one other occasion, I received a phone call from my bank inquiring about an unusual charge. I confirmed that this time it was a legitimate transaction I made and neither the account nor transaction were blocked.

And my bank blocked 3 fraudulent transaction for me just yesterday. I still have my card, and I had not used it online.

No idea how they got the number.

But it does actually work sometimes.

In my experience, informing the bank of travel makes no difference. They block regardless even when I inform and even for foreign charges that appear with regular frequency.

That whole "inform your bank thing" is no longer a thing, at least here. We went to Namibia/Zimbabwe last year and I tried to give them a heads up to not have my cc blocked. The hotline person said there is nothing they can do. If the software blocks it, it blocks it. No way for them to prevent that.

Like the peer comment, my experience is that informing about travel may or may not work and I’ve had really random rejections. These days I travel with backup cards including from totally different bank and network.

Yeah this story means that their anti fraud system sucks. false positives should be at 0.0001%

Pretty much. I travel with multiple cards from different banks. Recent trip where I notified the banks ahead of time I'd be travelling. Results as follows:

Bank 1 : no issues at all with them. Used that card in 6 countries within 40 hours.

Bank 2 : they killed the card on first use in foreign country (the one I listed as visiting). When I got back it took a week of calls to halfway sort out the mess and then I just cancelled the account in disgust.

Bank 3: they flagged the card. I was notified via app. I called them. They unlocked the account / transaction all was good from then on. Further transactions were fine.

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