Alice In Credit Card Land :: essays research papers

<a href="http//www.geocities.com/vaksam/">Sam Vaknins Psychology, Philosophy, Economics and Foreign Affairs Web SitesYour acknowledgment mental capacity is stolen. You place a phone call to the number tenderd in your tourist guide or in the local daily press. You provide your details and you cancel your card. You block it. In a few minutes, it should be transferred to the stop-list available to the authorization affectionatenesss worldwide. From that moment on, no thief will be able to fraudulently use your card. You can sigh in relief. The jeopardy is over. But is it ? It is definitely not. To understand why, we should first review the intricate act involved. In principle, the best and safest thing to do is call the authorization centre of the shore that issued your card (the issuer bank). Calling the number published in the media is secondment best because it connects the cardholder to a volunteer bank, which caters for the needs of all the issuers of a habitu ated card. Some service organizations (such as IAPA the International Air Passengers Association) provide a similar service. The catering bank accepts the call, notes down the details of the cardholder and prepares a autotype containing the instruction to cancel the card. The cancellation fax is then sent on to the offspring bank. The details of all the issuing banks are found in spare manuals published by the clearing and payments associations of all the banks that issue a specialised card. All the fiscal institutions that issue Mastercards, Eurocards and a few other more minor cards in Europe are members of Europay International (EPI). hither lies the first snag the catering bank often mistakes the identity of the issuer. some banks share the same name or are branches of a network. Banks with monovular names can exist in Prague, Budapest and Frankfurt, or Vienna, for instance. Should a fax cancelling the card be sent to the wrong bank the card will simply not be cancelle d until it is too late. By the magazine the mistake is discovered, the card is usually thoroughly treat and the financial means of the cardholder are exhausted. Additionally, going the indirect route (calling an intermediary bank instead of the issuing bank) translates into a delay which could prove monetarily crucial. By the time the fax is sent, it might be no longer necessary. If the card has been abused and fraudulent purchases or money withdrawals have been debited to the unfortunate cardholders bank or