American Express Gold - What's Wrong With This Picture?

Bear in mind the following headline benefit for the Gold Card

"YES, you can earn double Membership Rewards® points in your travel spend. It's easy.
Just use your card as normal when you travel and you'll get:
2 points for every full £1 spent and charged on travel purchases, including flights, hotels, car rentals, cruises and more.²"

Last night I tried to use the card to book rail travel up to Edinburgh for the Fringe in August. No can do, said the East Coast website, card declined. Oh well, I thought, a glitch, use another card.

This morning's inbox contained a message from Amex to get in touch over a potentially fraudulent transaction. This I do, and find that it's the attempt to purchase the rail tickets that hit their fraud-o-meter. I am told by the helpful chap on the phone that "it's because it's been used it a lot for travel". At least he had the grace to sound a bit abashed when I pointed out (a) that was the marketing message of the card and (b) if you look at my spending history over the past year it's almost all travel.

Still,I'll take the loss of a couple of hundred benefit points for an active fraud detection system.

Paul

Irritating but in my experience the fraud routines are laughable.

My experience with MBNA is as follows.

£1,600 online purchase of VS flight - OK
£ 299 online purchase of washing machine from Sainsburys - OK
£ 12.99 from Amazon - flagged as 'suspicious'

All the above done in the space of 48 hrs

I recall good friend of mine a few years back, he and his wife had a joint AMEX credit card. He was in Sydney in business and she had gone to Edinburgh to visit family. Both cards were stopped. When my friend called, AMEX explained that the cards were stopped because it was logged that 1 transaction was made in Sydney and one in Edinburgh on the same day, which was impossible! Well.... My friend asked the advisor if AMEX assumed that all joint card holders had to travel together all the time!!

The advisor was rather embarrassed when it was established there were 2 cards on the account!!

HSBC fraud dept are no smarter. I had a direct debit subscription to Experian stopped by them, because I made a purchase in California on the same day - which was authorised!

[honey lamb]

Similar experience to tonty with my Bank of Ireland credit card.

Shop till I drop in outlet mall in Las Vegas - OK
Shop till I drop in second outlet mall (including the most divine but expensive handbag) - OK
Credit card used for $3 bus ticket from said mall as my 24 hour ticket had expired and I had no dollar bills - card stopped!

I for one am very thankful that MBNA security caught a £805 on line fraud transcation on my card. Abooking was attempted on Air China.
Ironocally it was right after I'd booked my next trip to South Africa on VS..but via Opodo...this is problaby when the card awas "hijacked" ..no proof of course.

Enquires are ongoing but the fraud amount has been refunded.

HSBC fraud dept are no smarter. I had a direct debit subscription to Experian stopped by them, because I made a purchase in California on the same day - which was authorised!

True, I had an HSBC business card which was frequently declined for normal business type purchases. I complained and they agreed to be more careful with the fraud monitoring. Final straw was when it was declined at a hotel reception desk, and that was just for the incidentals auth!