In message , at 20:59:02 on Sun,
19 Jun 2011, Ken Wheatley remarked:

Have you spoken to your credit card issuers? I find these days that
rejections of payments are becoming more and more frequent due to
anti-fraud procedures.

The card issuer will almost certainly claim that no authorisation was
sought. I've had this several times.

My impression (having had a card charge declined via East Coast' website
the other day, and then accepted a minute later) is that the vendor
fires off a request to the card company, and if it gets lost on the way
out they interpret the lack of a positive response as a rejection. And
the card company then says "no-one tried to charge the card, it's not
our fault".

You'd think they had a more synchronous system that that, but it seems
not.
--
Roland Perry