I was at a gas station in Grand Forks, ND in the middle of winter at 2AM fueling up. I had traveled this route and stopped at this gas station at about the same time of night multiple times when I was going from ND to MN and back. The card (Citibank Visa) had a large open credit line, but it somehow got rejected because (and I quote) "they installed new software"[1]. This was a bit before I had a cellphone and luckily I had taken my Dad's advice and always kept cash hidden in the car. They promised it wouldn't happen again, and I remembered to make sure I had an emergency stash of cash in the car. I have no clue what I would have done if I had to only use that card.

1) I do get a little sick of companies feeling that "software" is a complete explanation for why something has gone wrong.

I remember as a kid how much money my parents would have to carry while on holiday, banks were closed and ATMs rare and often empty, shops in the country often wouldn't take cheques. Credit cards resulted in really slow vendor payment (remember paper credit card chunk clunk? those numbers are raised for a reason) and caused cash flow issues.

Anyway, one of the major telcos had an outage of their EFT system the last holiday weekend and everything broke. Except for people who had cash. I was quietly smug, but it shows how fragile the payment systems are.

I'm looking forward to a decent Weibo hack to cause a reassessment of the single centralised 'trust our ledger' model.

I was able to help out some family members who coincidentally where in same store during a EFT outage. I keep about $200 cash on me just in case. I was able to cover some necessities for them which they paid back next day when systems were back online. Nudged them a bit about not relying 100% on the plastic, esp after banks close.

That said, I wouldn't be carrying large amounts of cash on me in a country with civil forfeiture plus corrupt, police organizations trying to maximize seizure:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/11/civil-asset-forfei...

Good we have a lot of payment options here. :)

I remember that too; my grandfather used to go on business trips to NYC, and after adjusting for inflation the amount he carried was almost 5000 USD. Very few people walk around with that amount of cash today.

> Very few people walk around with that amount of cash today.

... because the cops would stop him, insinuate that the money probably had something to do with crime, and then seize it to line their own pockets cough cough I mean "bolster their budgets."

My grandfather was a WASP in a business suit. He's not going to get stop and frisked in NYC.

It's tragic that the unbanked (unable to get credit, often paid in cash, just don't have bank accounts) are the ones most likely stop be stopped by police and subject to unjust forfeiture. (With the exception of the Amish.)

Its interesting the total difference in how people deal with commerce going from the 70's to today. I remember the get check, deposit check, write checks and maybe go get money from the bank cycle. Heck, even if you had a credit card quite a lot of places wouldn't take it (not to mention the carbon paper).

People trust technology will always work. Its not a bad bet where banks are concerned, but I too worry about the chaos of even a couple of hours down time. I wonder if there will be a push back. There probably would have been except the unbanked can get pre-paid cards and pretty much do everything at Walmart or through PayPal and its competitors.

I was traveling in the middle of nowhere once, and planned to arrive at a particular gas station before they closed (at 10PM). I was delayed and was low on gas when I pulled into the only gas station for miles around.

It was completely dark, all the lights off, and no one there. But the pumps were active, so I put in my credit card, pumped, paid, and drove off.

So, I for one, am happy credit cards are there :) And that that gas station either forgot to shut off the pumps, or maybe they left them on for locals.

For sure, the credit card at the pump has been an amazing convenience for rural areas. I do love the ability, but it is a pain when the credit card company’s software doesn’t feel you need that convenience.

That’s anti-fraud to stop someone from stealing your card and using it elsewhere. You can usually pre-empt that by informing the bank of travel.

Anti-fraud may been the reason on that day, but who knows what will be the reason tomorrow (eg Capital Controls as it happened in Greece). The main point is that I still had to get permission. It's kind of like when I was a kid, I wasn't allowed to go outside the house unless I informed my parents, which was like getting permission implicitly.

When using cash, you do not have to inform the bank anything.

No you have to visit a money exchanger in advance, exchange some money into local currency, then go to your destination.

Which...is the same thing you need to do anyway to use your card in China.

If you're in the US or Europe, you'll probably get a better rate by exchanging cash into local currency at your destination.

For me, it’s always been cheapest to use an ATM at my destination, and let my bank do the currency conversion instead of using the rate offered by the ATM. My bank charges me something like max(5€, 1%), which is usually substantially cheaper than all the other options. I think this is more or less the same (or cheaper) for all German banks.

Almost all UK banks charge 2.75% above the visa/mc wholesale rate for overseas transactions. Plus they usually charge 1%-1.5% for overseas ATM transactions.

This is so prevalent that it's common for new banks (or existing banks doing a push for their new current account) to offer commission-free overseas spending. But many of them have pulled the 'perk' after they've gained a large enough customer base. If I recall correctly, at least Halifax, Nationwide and Metro Bank have in the past offered accounts with no commission on overseas card transactions, and then changed the terms to the standard (2.25%-2.75%) after 1-3 years.

Anti-fraud is done for the bank's benefit, with little incentive to prevent false positives. In my own experience, 100% of my blocked transactions have been false over the last few years (since I moved out of the US, where fraud is more rampant). It's extremely annoying - it's my money, but I can't use it because the bank is being overly conservative.

100% of fraudulent transactions have gone through silently on my card. Despite the fact that many times my bank has sent me an SMS querying whether something was kosher. Doubly perplexing because they were OS hotel and airline charges, I had a stream of local transactions (fuel, supermarket), I very rarely pay hotels directly, and the bank makes it easy to tell them you are going OS.

After much drama they refunded me. The hotel didn't seem to even care -- presumably they were not getting a huge charge back. IDK if it was a 'card not present' or what. They couldn't even tell me the name of the person using my card -- privacy rules.

Maybe switch banks? My experience is I've had my account blocked exactly once - and that turned out to be actual identity theft. In the end, I didn't permanently lose any money thanks to the system working as intended. On one other occasion, I received a phone call from my bank inquiring about an unusual charge. I confirmed that this time it was a legitimate transaction I made and neither the account nor transaction were blocked.

And my bank blocked 3 fraudulent transaction for me just yesterday. I still have my card, and I had not used it online.

No idea how they got the number.

But it does actually work sometimes.

In my experience, informing the bank of travel makes no difference. They block regardless even when I inform and even for foreign charges that appear with regular frequency.

That whole "inform your bank thing" is no longer a thing, at least here. We went to Namibia/Zimbabwe last year and I tried to give them a heads up to not have my cc blocked. The hotline person said there is nothing they can do. If the software blocks it, it blocks it. No way for them to prevent that.

Like the peer comment, my experience is that informing about travel may or may not work and I’ve had really random rejections. These days I travel with backup cards including from totally different bank and network.

Yeah this story means that their anti fraud system sucks. false positives should be at 0.0001%

Pretty much. I travel with multiple cards from different banks. Recent trip where I notified the banks ahead of time I'd be travelling. Results as follows:

Bank 1 : no issues at all with them. Used that card in 6 countries within 40 hours.

Bank 2 : they killed the card on first use in foreign country (the one I listed as visiting). When I got back it took a week of calls to halfway sort out the mess and then I just cancelled the account in disgust.

Bank 3: they flagged the card. I was notified via app. I called them. They unlocked the account / transaction all was good from then on. Further transactions were fine.

Yep, I've had that happen to me every time I travelled back to Berlin when I was living in London. Every single time my Barclay's card would refuse to work.

So not even some exotic far away location (not that that's an excuse), but London/Berlin. From a customer that Barclay's knew came from Berlin.

Cash.

It works.

That's why I travel with at least 2 cards from different banks. Fortunately in my country there are plenty of banks with free service for debit cards.

Some banks require you to tell them when you are heading overseas. It helps to avoid this, and protect you from fraud.

It doesn't have to be like this though. One of my banks has an interface in the mobile app where I can unlock different continents for purchases and withdrawals for a set amount of time.