Evening chaps. Would you be able to recommend me a bank where the fraud blocks are optional, i.e. you can turn off your bank's tendency to block everything? I am with Barclays and fuck me sideways - I can book a £200 hotel ok, and a £30 train ticket, but if I book another £10 ticket (lol split ticketting) it has a shit fit and blocks your card. It didn't do that when a grand was taken out my account, though.
There aren't any. Banks have a legal duty of care to their customers.
Monzo have by far the most sophisticated and unobtrusive fraud detection, because they've built their systems from the ground up rather than bolting them on to decades-old mainframe systems. AFAIK you can do literally everything through their app, including unfreezing a frozen card.
Halifax always asks me to confirm through the app if it thinks anything is up. Seems like a pretty reasonable system.
It still flags for weird reasons, it let me blow £400 on clothes (don't ask, I'm replacing more or less my entire decade old wardrobe) last week but then asked me about the £20 takeaway I got that night. But it doesn't block anything, just asks for your fingerprint.
Same. Halifax is not a great bank, but their app is stable, and as you say, even though sometimes it decides that the coffee I buy from the same location at the same time every weekday morning for the last year is now, in fact, obviously suspicious, all you have to do is log on and it's fine again.
>>9305 >Monzo have by far the most sophisticated and unobtrusive fraud detection
Sophisticated, yes. Unobtrusive, not necessarily. There are plenty of reports of people getting their accounts frozen for seemingly no reason. Fraud detection is ultimately a trade-off. When fraud occurs, the bank needs to return the customer's money, and if they can't stop, reverse or recover somewhere down the line, they're on the hook for it. That means that how sensitive and specific their systems are hinge on how much risk they want to accept in terms of transactions slipping past them and having to cough up out of pocket. For upstarts like Monzo, a lack of a large capital investment base means they necessarily have a lower tolerance, which means calibrating their systems for higher sensitivity and lower specificity.
It's also worth remembering that customers can themselves underestimate the risk of transactions they enter into. In my younger days, I made the mistake of buying hard drives on the same day as I'd paid for a file-sharing service. As far as my bank was concerned, they'd seen a small payment to a company in Eastern Europe followed shortly by an order for several hundred pounds worth of electronic equipment and understandably their system got twitchy.
>>9425 Natwest interviewed me for the best part of half an hour before they allowed me to send £3000 to myself at another bank. Among other things I had to justify why my computer had remote desktop enabled, why my phone appeared to be using a VPN (it was an adblocker) and why I had chosen a savings account with an APR lower than their ISA (it was an LISA - an account type he didn't know existed).
>>9425 Natwest have spotted every fraudulent act ever committed on my bank account. They're very good. To this day, I have no idea how they could tell it wasn't me sending money from Yeovil to someone in Reading, but that it was me sending money to buy things from China, Japan, and Eastern Europe.