Fancy you have finally got a chance to go on your dream trip to Chili, Mexico, Brazil, the Maldives, or the Caribbean. You enjoy every minute of your vacation, lying in the beach, walking around the place, eating feijoado completa in Sao Paolo, or drinking Red Stripe in Jamaica. Imagine your righteous anger and disappointment when you find your credit card that you are trying to pay for your hotel stay in Rio or for another shot of Jamaican rum with to be suspended. This can really mess up your getaway.
You can laugh at it, but your credit card fraud protection system is the one to blame for your spoiled holidays. If you didn’t bother to contact your credit card company beforehand to inform them about your trip, you could come across a credit card suspension when trying to make transactions.

No one would question the importance and necessity of credit card fraud monitoring systems. Such programs guarantee you fraud and identity theft protection. And the problem of different types and numerous cases of credit card fraud do not need any words. Figures speak louder. The statistics experts report that credit card holders lost over 3,200 million USD in 2007 as a result of fraudsters’ attacks.

Fraud Monitoring Systems Harm?  

However, there are some downsides to fraud monitoring that credit consumers suffer from. So, what can trigger red flags within a fraud protection system and become the reason for your credit card decline?
Credit card issuers track their customers’ spending habits. And any purchase that is untypical of you can cause a temporary card suspension. Let’s figure out how exactly particular fraud monitoring systems work.

Credit Card Companies’ Secret Weapon

Visa’s Continuous Monitoring system, for instance, is aimed at preventing fraud, in general, works on the same basis. They keep track of their card owners purchase habits and once they spot some abnormal, to their mind, transaction, they suspend their client’s plastic. The grounds for Visa’s monitoring system can be triggered by a delivery address mismatching the credit card billing address, an unusually large purchase, changes in personal information (a birth date, name, of SSN change).
In 2005, Visa introduced a new system called Advanced Authorization. It gives a rating of potentially fraudulent transactions. MasterCard credit card holders are also protected by a multilevel system monitoring accounts on the subject of uncharacteristic spending activity. And it is not just large credit card companies that set fraud monitoring systems. Nearly all credit card issuers offer this kind of protection to their customers.
Besides monitoring programs offered by credit card companies, there are different risk management services that offer fraud protection as well. They function pretty much on the same principle. They subject credit card transactions to about 200 tests in order to determine the probability of a transaction to be fraudulent. The results are compared to the proven fraudulent transactions and are assigned a score from 0 to 99, which lets retailers make a considerate decision. Basing on this information they accept or decline the payment.

Travels Are a Special Concern 

Basically, all purchases found to be outside the norm by a monitoring system trigger red flags. But travels are considered to be a bad risk area for credit card processing. Eastern Europe, Russia, and the West African nation of Nigeria, Miami, Detroit, and Brooklyn are among the places associated with credit card fraud in the first place.
So, protecting you from credit card fraud, monitoring systems can veto your legitimate purchases. What can you do to avoid it? The solution is pretty simple. Before going on a journey, making some large purchase, or changing your personal credit card data, just contact your credit card company and let them know about beforehand. This way you will manage to get running with the hare and hunting with the hounds –you avoid credit card fraud and can enjoy your vacations, or just make any transactions trouble-free.