AT&T To Use Phone Geolocation To Prevent Credit Card Fraud

jfruh (300774) writes "Imagine you've spent years making credit card purchases in your home state of California, and suddenly a bunch of charges appear the card in Russia. Your bank might move to shut the card down for suspected fraud, which would be great if your account number had been stolen by hackers — but really irritating if you were on vacation in Moscow. AT&T is proposing a service that would allow customers to let their bank track their movements via their cell phone, to confirm that you (or at least your phone) and your credit card are in the same place."

Comments

Or call your credit card company ...

[perpenso]

Or call your credit card company before you leave and say you will be traveling in country X on these days.

Re:Or call your credit card company ...

[TechyImmigrant]

>Or call your credit card company before you leave and say you will be traveling in country X on these days.

Tried that. They still blocked the card after my first transaction abroad.
You are making the mistake of thinking banks have processes that meet your needs, rather than their needs.

Re:Or call your credit card company ...

[click2005]

A text whenever your credit card was used saying "Card with number ending in xxxx was used in location yyyy, if this was a fraudulent charge reply to this text" would work just as well without the privacy issue of tracking locations.

Re:Or call your credit card company ...

[Frosty Piss]

Tried that. They still blocked the card after my first transaction abroad. You are making the mistake of thinking banks have processes that meet your needs, rather than their needs.

I bank with B of A, and travel a few times a year to far away places. I've never had this issue. Perhaps you need to look into a different bank?

Re:Or call your credit card company ...

[BitZtream]

They do.

Yours may not, or you talked to the wrong person, but its fairly common. Bank of America certainly does, as does Capital One. BoA emailed informing me I would be cut off within 24 hours if I didn't respond or answer when called, then called me once while in Vegas blowing money, after confirming with them that I was legitimately spending my money, I asked if I could avoid the problem in the future, so they don't cut me off if I DON'T get the call/email in time. The answer was simple, call us before going out of town at the number on the card, inform them of the trip and time period and they'll change their processing (but not stop it) so you won't be left stranded.

AT&T does the same thing for phone calls, tell them you're leaving the country and don't want to be considered suspicious they'll note the time of the trip and give you a pass for that time, they also suggested I sign up for the 'world' plan for roaming for that month as it was something like $5, which was basically the cost of the per minute rate in that country for AT&T roaming if I wasn't on the plan but $1 or so on the plan. Just remember to cancel at the end of the trip.

Re:Or call your credit card company ...

[Jane Q. Public]

You've just described every business, not just banks. Well, at least the successful ones. They are all in it for their needs. Your needs only come into play only to the extent it's necessary for them to meet their needs.

And YOU'VE just described what my father explained to me, when I was small, is called "doing bad business". Sadly, many in the U.S. these days have seen these big corrupt corporations, and assumed things were always that way. They weren't. In fact they still aren't, in most cases, that don't involve giant corporations or government.

"Good business" is when both people walk away from a transaction satisfied that they got a fair deal. And ideally, when each thinks they got the better deal.

"Bad business" is gouging customers for services that aren't really what they want. Only one party is happy, and the other is greatly dissatisfied.

Free markets depend on the first kind of business. Many economists say the second kind doesn't exist for long without government collusion.

Re:Or call your credit card company ...

[DrPeper]

THANK YOU! Somebody FINALY got what's really going on here. This isn't about helping customers (at all) it's about AT&T attempting to find an "EXCUSE" to keep and monetize location information. This is a VERY bad idea for consumers.

Re:Or call your credit card company ...

[PRMan]

ALWAYS have 3 credit cards from 3 different banks. (Preferably VISA, MC and either Discover or AMEX). Diversification is the only way to win.

Re:Or call your credit card company ...

[DutchUncle]

This. And when I managed to call, the agent said my prior call and travel notice were in the activity log . . . but somehow hadn't taken effect. The only funny part - the dinky little car rental agency had Skype set up for me to make the US call before I finished asking how I was going to do it. They wanted to make me happy and do business, unlike the banks who figure you have to do business with them whether you're happy or not.

Why cant you pick by regions on a map

[Marrow]

Everybody has a website these days. Just let us pick the regions where we will allow transactions to take place. If we are going on vacation, we can light up Russia or Antartica. Then we can turn it off again as soon as we get back. Seems like it would take very little effort on their part to setup.

Buying a new phone

[TechyImmigrant]

You're screwed if you break your phone and then go to the store to buy a replacement.

Re:Stupid

[ohieaux]

I absolutely pull out my AT&T sim card before traveling. I've seen too many stories of people getting gouged by US cellphone companies.

This sounds like a disaster for someone trapped overseas. It sounds more like a way for AT&T to force customers into the trap of using their cell phone overseas.

Obligatory

[ArcadeMan]

In Soviet Russia, credit card charge YOU!

Are you sure?

[Marrow]

Maybe your credit was.....frozen....at the time.

Sorry bout that, couldn't resist.

This has already happend to me

[volvox_voxel]

BOA did this to me a few years ago.. I'd make some purchases before traveling abroad only to have my card shut off when I was in Ukraine.. You have to warn them of your travel plans, as there is a very real chance you will be cut off from your funds. This happened to my wife, and it happened to me. It pays to call customer service. BOA has been pretty draconian to us in the past.. It once even shut off my card because I bought too much food at my local supermarket.. Card service providers mentioned that it was above my normal trend for supermarket purchases ( I have excellent credit, and am not sure why they were so skittish; I have no history of fraudulent transactions) ... We had a screaming infant with us at the time, and had to call customer service with a large basket of food we couldn't walk out with, who would have otherwise been fine if we didn't have to wait so long on the phone..

These days I'm careful to carry around more than one credit card in case I run into a similar issue..

Re:This has already happend to me

[93 Escort Wagon]

BOA did this to me a few years ago.. I'd make some purchases before traveling abroad only to have my card shut off when I was in Ukraine.

Well, Mr. Putin - maybe NEXT TIME you'll think before you invade another country!

Re:International roaming might be convenient ...

[I'm New Around Here]

Sprint's buying a gas station chain?

Why?

Push payments?

[Todd Knarr]

If they're going to track your cel phone, that means they're assuming you have your cel phone on you. So why not send the authorization code to your cel phone and let you give it to the merchant? That way it doesn't matter if the card's stolen, the merchant can't get an auth code if you aren't present with your phone. Or better yet, have an app that'll let you punch in the merchant's ID and transaction number and initiate the payment from your end, rather than having the merchant handle your card? That makes stealing the card pointless, because just having the card isn't enough to let you make a charge.

domestically stupid

[globaljustin]

nothing in TFA (or the ATT page it links to) say this is **international only**

I did note this in TFA however...

AT&T plans to test a service allowing payment card providers to access the location of a customer's phone to improve the accuracy of fraud prevention systems for transactions made abroad.

this is tracking your phone, all the time, and letting your credit card company access the data

I see this as using fraud to justify spying on you

Re:domestically stupid

[Belial6]

Yep, it would be easier, less intrusive, and more reliable for the credit card company to send you a text message that you need to reply to, or to have an app that pops up a charge confirmation every time a charge is made. They don't need to know where your phone is. They just need your phone to acknowledge that the charge was legit.

I don't know the details, but I have become pretty well convinced that credit card companies have some kind of accounting/tax trick that actually brings in a profit from the credit card fraud. They go well out of their way to avoid trivial fixes that would improve security. Simply requiring a PIN would kill a massive amount of fraud. Generating temporary numbers for online purchases would kill another huge segment of fraud. For some reason they choose not to do that.

From personal experience, my wife's estranged mother fraudulently opened an account using my wife's information. We didn't find out about it until years later when it's default showed up on our credit report. It was easy for my wife to fix because the card was opened prior to her 18th birthday, and she had not had contact with her mother for 2 years prior to that, so the credit card company just cleared the default, and notified the credit reporting agencies. The credit card company was absolutely clear that they were not interested in prosecuting for the fraud though.

On another occasion, I had fraudulent charges on a Chase card. When I notified them, they removed the charges, and issued me a new card. Two days before they mailed the new card with a new account number, new charges were made on the new account number. This happened again when they issued me a third card. All the while, they kept insisting that they did not have an internal problem, and did not want to hear that the new fraudulent charges were on a card that could not have been used by anyone outside of their company because no physical card had left their building.

Re:Not really

[internerdj]

So what about those of us who refuse a smartphone for various reasons? I wouldn't mind having one but I'm not going to shell out another $20/month for internet on a device that I mainly use in a place where I already pay for the internet.

Re:Stupid

[LifesABeach]

This service is already done by the credit card company's. So you clear it with your credit card company, and then call your phone company? Really? This smells of a way to sell Geo location data, but you don't get any money for their transaction about you.

Re:Stupid

[anagama]

Just how broad is the radius of this location? If a person living in New York City buys something online from a store in Seattle while he and his phone are in NY, where does the credit card transaction occur? If the answer is Seattle, the definition of what is a reasonable proximity between transaction and phone has to be quite loose, otherwise a lot of legit transactions will be botched. I don't actually know anything about CC processing however, so I would be interested in hearing from people who do.

Re:Exactly right

[Jane Q. Public]

If your system is vulnerable to attack by corrupt "leaders", that's the system's fault. It's the problem with Marxism and it's also the problem with capitalism: when people get power, via state-backed control of capital or via a "dictatorship of the proletariat", these use that power in their own interests.

Nonsense.

As I mentioned earlier: just about ANY system can be corrupted. And some more than others. Socialism, for example, has proven to be the world's ripest breeding ground for corruption, because it is designed to be led by a relatively few people in the first place.

The U.S. has the longest-standing Constitutional government in the last milennium or two. That says an awful lot for this system, as opposed to others that have been tried in the same period. (That is to say: all of them. Except Communism, because there has never been a real Communist government in written history.)

Re:Exactly right

[Jane Q. Public]

Presumably this is some weird American definition, not used by anyone who actually is a socialist.

I was using Marx's definition of Socialism.

Parliamentary democracy has lasted well over a millennium (e.g. Iceland continuously since the 10th C) and is doing fine, thanks.

Not under one Constitution, which is what I referred to.

Well, there have, but within a decade of attaining power they all become juntas or oligarchies or even monarchies (North Korea again). Sadly communism is too idealistic about human nature and doesn't have the checks and balances to stop power crazy psychopaths from taking control. Your constitution was written to prevent excessive concentration of power, and is fairly effective at that, frustrating as it is for zealots on either side. But it's not the only workable way to do it.

No, there haven't. Again, using Marx's definition. The closest anybody ever came was a bad form of Socialism.

Communism -- true Communism, by the very definition of what Communism is -- has no government. Name me one country in written history that qualifies.

Re:Exactly right

[Jane Q. Public]

Marx isn't Mohammed. He doesn't define "socialism" for everyone now, if he ever did, and certainly few if any socialists I know would defer to his definition. Any Marxists still around hate socialists more than anyone else for not being pure enough.

If you're talking about the theory of government, then you either accept the "official" definition, or you're talking about something else.

Historically, Marx defined Socialism in much the same way Smith defined Capitalism. Each described his theory in great detail and had a huge influence on the world in subsequent decades.

I understand that different definitions do exist. But if you're talking about them, then you're talking about something other than what I was talking about. So then what's the point?

That was the final stage, which of course was never attained. Many though did have quite idyllic "all for one and one for all" periods of altruistic government for a short time after the revolution, until the assholes started manoeuvring for power.

Which is what Marx defined as "Socialism": a necessary step on the way to Communism, in which the means of production are owned and controlled by a strong central authority.

And I agree: the problem with it is simply that once you get to that stage, the assholes never want to give up power. Which is precisely (in my opinion and the opinion of some theorists) why Communism never actually came to pass.

Anyway, I wouldn't care about your silly word games except you are using them to say every form of government except your own is shit. A sadly common insular American attitude.

You can call them "shit" if you want, but then you would have to acknowledge that the theory and history of economics is shit, because that's what I'm referring to. I studied this "shit", dude, in pretty exhausting detail.