So I booked some flights yesterday using my AmEx card from Lloyds TSB. About 5 minutes later I got a call on my UK phone. I wondered what it was for a while, as I hadn’t heard it ring for over a year but realised it was a phone call and picked it up eventually. The voice on the other end was a recorded message and it said it was from my bank. It called me “Mr Robert L. I. U.”, presumably because the computer didn’t know how to pronounce my name.
I followed through a few questions quizzing me some details which I had to answer by pressing my keypad then it confirmed some transactions. It cleverly asked questions that they should know and I should know but didn’t ask me directly for it. E.g. what was the year of my birth. Press 1 for 1984, 2 for 1974…etc. It seems pretty smart and safe for the consumer and I assume that if I had selected the option that they weren’t genuine transactions they would have stopped my card and reversed those transactions. My cards have been blocked by bank’s security checks on average once per year per card. Which makes me think that my spending habit is exactly like that of a stolen credit card… Perhaps the banks should offer some other way of confirming these transactions are genuine without the inconvenience of blocking the card and waiting for me to call them! So, in some ways, I was quite happy about the call from Lloyds TSB but it did take about 5 minutes of my time (I wonder how much that cost me on my roaming plan?!).
