The only time I ever had a fraudulent transaction on my card, it wasn't stopped until they'd wiped out my account by gambling £1,900 of my money on Littlewoods Online. The bank never stopped my account, the criminals only stopped taking money when they'd emptied the account and run up an overdraft, at which point my card started declining. I only found out when I tried to buy a train ticket home and got 'card declined.'

I got the money back, but I was totally skint for a fortnight while the bank and police sorted it out. It was nothing to do with being overseas, either. My card got cloned at a well known Indian restaurant in Manchester.

Meanwhile, the same bank did stop my card for fraud prevention when I legitimately travelled to the US and used it there, myself, to buy a few bits and bobs in Target and get some cash out of an ATM, totalling all of about $70. I had to make an expensive mobile phone call back to them in Britain to tell them that yes, it's me. I don't think they get it sometimes.

They seem to do it solely by geography. UK good, overseas bad. Whereas if they had an iota of common sense, they would have been able to say "look, this guy's never spent a penny on gambling before, why has he suddenly spent his entire pay and overdraft on a betting website," and "look, he bought a plane ticket from American Airlines the other week, now he's using his card in the US, it's legit."

Surely there's some bright startup out there who could do this with data?

The overseas thing used to happen to me regularly too. I was traveling to San Francisco regularly for work, and after the first few trips I always made sure I had at least enough in USD on me to get to the hotel, and would always try my card first thing at the airport to get them to block it as soon as possible so I could call and get it unblocked right away.

It's gotten better - now they (Barclays) have an option in the online banking to explicitly inform them when going abroad to reduce the chance of a block. It still annoys me that I have to, but at least it's a lesser nuisance than a card block.

You'd think that after the 4th or 5th attempt, though, they would start to accept that a withdrawal of a small amount at the exact same ATM at SFO would be ok. But no.

Also, if they were to call me and check without blocking my card, I'd still be annoyed, but less so. That's what really annoys me - in no cases has there been a sudden flurry of rapid transactions, and so the risk of trying to get hold of me before blocking the card is rather small. Instead they block first and tries to call afterwards.

Another pet peeve is their security system. They call you, from a number you likely won't know is Barclays unless you take care to check the number and then save it on your phone. It's just begging for a social engineering attack by obtaining phone numbers and birth dates (the only authentication used), say from a fake online survey about banking with a price, coupled with reading up fake transactions, and proceed to put them through to an "operator" to help reverse the fake fraudulent charges, and then have the operator ask them to confirm the card details "for security", which the customers are conditioned to do when initiating the call themselves.

As much as it's more convenient, you'd think their fraud department would be more security conscious and ask you to find their number of the official website or something, but I guess that'd raise the number of complaints about their frequent blocks too much.

>That's what really annoys me - in no cases has there been a sudden flurry of rapid transactions, and so the risk of trying to get hold of me before blocking the card is rather small. Instead they block first and tries to call afterwards.

I'm not sure what the laws are in your home country, but in the US, banks have incentive to block first and ask questions later because they're legally on the hook for any fraudulent charges under federal law. Quite simply, they'd rather mildly irritate you than potentially lose money to a lost or stolen card.

With many credit card issuers, you can simply call in advance to let them know you'll be traveling. Every time I pick up foreign currency at my bank (Royal Bank of Canada) they remind me to phone the credit card department and let them know when and where I'll be traveling to avoid any difficulties.

I've had it happen twice with Mastercard in the last year or two.

In both cases I made a small purchase at a fast food restaurant, followed immediately by a large purchase. This was one of their triggers, which makes sense. Thief tests card, then immediately tries to max it out.

It nearly caused me a huge problem the first time since I was purchasing an engagement ring and they called my now fiancee regarding the transaction. Thankfully they didn't give any details but it still meant I had to lie about it all about which I was not pleased.