Big Brother is watching your credit card habits

Deviations from your normal behaviour with the plastic can result in some searching questions, reports PIERS FORD.

If retail therapy is one of the best cures for jet lag, nothing reactivates the symptoms like a sales assistant who suddenly wants to know everything about you, from your date of birth to your mother's maiden name.

In the euphoria of liberating your plastic after a long-haul flight, it can be difficult to appreciate that your credit card company has your welfare at heart when it prompts a hotel manager to start acting like the Inquisitor-General.

Credit card companies are using increasingly sophisticated systems to combat the constant threat of fraud. Most of these methods are now based on neural networks technology that enables them to build profiles of their cardholders and react fast when the cardholder acts "out of character."

Whether you're shopping on 5th Avenue or in Cairo's Khan el-Khalili bazaar, behaviour that doesn't fit your usual spending pattern will trigger an alarm on the credit card company's fraud desk. And that's when questions may be asked to ensure that you really are the cardholder.

Until that is proved, the company may withhold authorisation, leaving you locked out of your hotel room or hanging around at the till. In extreme cases, if it suspects that your card has been stolen it might even alert the nearest police station.

In principle, these measures should reassure you. After all, impersonation following credit card and personal document theft is one of the strongest trends in fraud.

According to the British Credit Industry Fraud Avoidance System (Cifas), a data-sharing organisation with members in the retail, credit card and banking sectors, cases of impersonation rose by 23 per cent during the first eight months of 2000.

In practice, however, reactions can range from mild irritation to an uneasy sense that Big Brother is watching you.

"My wife has a Visa card on one of my accounts which she rarely uses and I tend to use only for large purchases," says one frequent traveller. "On one trip to the US, she used the card in a number of shops to make fairly small, less than $50, purchases.

"By the fourth shop in 45 minutes she was asked to speak to the card authorisation service, to confirm her address and other details, because they said the spending pattern had changed."

In 1999, Barclaycard implemented one of the world's most advanced systems for identifying fraudulent card use. The system's intelligence means fraud-detection agents can now initiate verification procedures in minutes rather than days, taking all the circumstances of the transaction into account.

Jennifer Allerton, the IT director of Barclaycard, who herself was subject to a check after she indulged in some frantic jewellery shopping in the Far East, agrees that not everyone is pleased to have their identity questioned.

But she points out that the rising tide of fraud means travellers face the constant risk of theft and should feel reassured. "I thought people would object more," she says. "But the reality is that most of our customers are very positive about it.

"Our system allows us to manage a whole grey area of customer interface, detecting and assessing changes in behaviour without necessarily stepping in and stopping transactions," Allerton says.

- INDEPENDENT