John B wrote:
On 24 Jun, 20:05, (Neil Williams)
wrote:
In the UK it is also conventional that you notify your bank if you
intend on travelling abroad.

It is? I've never done or heard of this, and nor have any of the other
people I've just asked about it...

The older way of doing things was to simply deny all out-of-country
transactions unless the customer had specifically requested to be able
to use their card in a particular foreign country. However, with the
amount of international travel these days -- and the amount of flak they
got for denying people's charges when they went on vacation -- that has
generally fallen out of practice.

Today, many of the better banks have "intelligent" systems that try to
spot detect fraud based on usage patterns. If you rarely traveled out
of your city/country or made large purchases, they might flag such
transactions at the time of sale and either deny them, require the
merchant call them, or even now call the customer's cell phone to
verify. If you _knew_ you were about to change your pattern, you would
call up and let them know to turn off the flags for a particular period.

S