cjrgreen: You can disagree all you like. Won't do anything to get Visa to allow you to use your CC under conditions where the issuer has decided they will not do business because of the risk of fraud. Whether this makes a lie of their advertising is of little concern to them and probably affords you no way to seek redress.
Pretty much all Visa card issuers now have country block lists. Each one has its own. Some of these are really damn extreme; I'm looking at one that reads "Mexico, Turkey, Thailand, Croatia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, South Africa, Honduras, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Pakistan, Ukraine, Singapore, Hong Kong, Spain, Taiwan, Russian Federation, Romania, Italy, Australia." (Frontier Community Credit Union, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas) Lists like this usually mean that the issuer will automatically decline any transaction from a merchant located in these countries. Not just require additional verification. Decline, period, no recourse other than changing card issuers. Worst case, they can freeze your card for an attempted transaction that crosses their fraud threshold.
Credit unions are the worst for this. Prepaid Visa issuers are right behind. Commercial banks, which are more used to international transactions, are generally less restrictive. But, sad to say, none of them violate Visa policy. Indeed, I expect Visa policy and their contracts with these issuers
require them to maintain fraud prevention programs.
Doesn't matter what the contract says, fraud is illegal and they can't claim that Visa or Mastercard logo cards are accepted everywhere that the logo is shown if they allow such vast lists of places to be barred, but yet have legitimate use of the logo.
Yes, they do have to have fraud prevention programs, but allowing the CC companies to decide with whom I do business is really bad for companies that claim otherwise.
We've already seen massive abuse, if there were a viable alternative I'd be using it as quite frankly it's disgusting the way that they cut off WIkileaks from legitimate donations as soon as it sounded like they were going to be targeted.
GameRager: Yes but if you then tell them you ok the money going out and they are notified it isn't fraud and they still don't do it then it's not them covering their asses anymore.
cjrgreen: When it's an Internet transaction in a country where payment card fraud is common,
how the Hell do they know it's you? The same way that they do under other circumstances. I get that your pro-corporate, but at some point it gets absurd. If the CC can't keep the authentication details under wraps enough to be able to make that call, then they sure as hell aren't going to ever be able to verify a transaction as legitimate regardless of whom the money is going to.
