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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

To be fair the Bank did nothing wrong.

Having fraud detection that didn't catch a £2500 outlier without freezing the card and contacting the owner to ask if it was a legitimate purchase could be considered doing something wrong.

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I mean, maybe?

Fraud detection is a constant balancing of false positives and false negatives. You basically can't travel these days without multiple credit cards in case one is randomly flagged for something.

> You basically can't travel these days without multiple credit cards in case one is randomly flagged for something.

You can, you tell your bank that you're about to travel so they can relax whatever system flags it. Happened a few times that my card got locked when I went to South America, so started telling my bank before leaving and hasn't happened since.

I asked my bank to do that in one case, they basically said "there is no way for us to do that". So instead the only way they can do it is to try calling me on my phone when said transaction is made to confirm, my phone whose SIM won't be compatible with the network halfway across the planet you stupid fucks.

Honestly the only fool proof way is to travel with cash, banks are incompetent.

One of my banks told me that entering travel information wasn't necessary any longer (and in fact there's no way to do it). In fairness though I've had zero issue with overseas charges for years at this point with that bank.

That said, I almost always have local currency as well. Which post-pandemic and much-reduced travel unfortunately means I have baggies of all sorts of foreign currency for places I may not travel to again at this point.

>You can, you tell your bank that you're about to travel so they can relax whatever system flags it.

I do this every time I travel and yet I regularly get my card locked anyway.

Sounds like you need to shop around for a new bank then if they frequently ignore requests of yours :)

I've still had trivial domestic purchases flagged though fairly infrequently in recent years. I've had $200 in groceries in the US declined. I'd still advise anyone to carry two credit cards from two separate banks. It also helps if you leave a card at a restaurant or otherwise lose.

You are making the assumption that that would be an outlier of an expense. Perhaps the mom also spends equal if not more amounts on Roblox and those transactions are a large part of the balance sheet, and legitimate. The illegitimacy only came when the daughter did the spend. ASSumptions are fun.

If you read the article, it's clear the mom wasn't familiar with the game let alone spends money on it herself. She said the game looked "innocent" and "very basic."

> "We'd just seen hundreds of transactions, these payment confirmations, so then the panic set in - oh my gosh, whose card is this on?," said Georgina.

It was over many transactions, not a single transaction for £2500, and it's probably likely that the parent had previously purchased whatever the heck is purchasable on this game for their daughter, giving the transaction some sort of signal that it's okay.

>Her daughter had managed to spend more than £2,500 on the site but most were small transactions of around £20.

You can't block this without annoying a lot of legitimate customers, so it's a business decision.

The bank can ask for an additional validation on purchases like validating a transaction in a mobile app as part of the payment flow. This is part of 3D Secure and 'Strong Customer Authentication' (https://stripe.com/docs/strong-customer-authentication), and it's a legal requirement in Europe. Having every n-th transaction with Roblox require accepting a notification in your mobile app would stop this sort of issue for 99% of customers.

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