I really am reaching the end of my patience with banks and their OTT security

maisie_cat

Every time I need to find my phone so I can put a code in I'm a bit annoyed.
It is fact of life now, banks protecting themselves from incompetent customers.
I had similar with Morrisons, it would be quite easy to use click and collect with a stolen card or claim that it wasn't you.
I do find it odd that I need photo id for the tip but not to collect £150 of shopping.

fenwick458

JP2019 said:

So back to my original question, is there some way I can opt out of this? Or will I be wasting my time making that phone call? 

try another bank would be my first suggestion. or even better, have more than one account so if one card gets block, try the other

IvanOpinion

I think it is great that banks are taking security seriously.  Since law changes that made the banks responsible for peoples incompetence and stupidity we have to expect that they are going to do their best to protect their interests (and your money).

Maybe have a word with the bank and ask them why it keeps getting turned down - what is it that is raising the flag.  On the one occasion it has happened to me (several years ago) it was because of a mismatch in my details (a simple typo).

Maybe banks should allow opt outs - as soon as the customer signs a waiver that absolves the bank of any responsibility if/when the customer gets scammed or money goes missing.

theoretica

Thinking a bit more about why some people seem more likely to be troubled than others - I wonder if there is a mismatch with too much computer security of one sort interfering with the banks' scrutiny algorithms.  If you have your privacy settings and private networks so tight that the bank can't tell you are making the transactions from the same, trusted, device. 

[Deleted User]

The real reason why this happens so much is the algorithms that do it have been calibrated too conservatively to avoid false negatives. A false positive annoys the customer, a false negative loses the bank money and there's little incentive to change this because the banks can always just say it's about security and waft away criticism. 

In reality it is legitimately annoying because of how time consuming it is to get your account unblocked. I feel like a lot of people haven't experienced this yet and are thinking of it like the old school "text yes to confirm a transaction and they'll process it" system. This is nothing like that, you'll have to answer umpteen questions and wait for them to do endless fiddling with the computer system. It takes hours to fix.

Zanderman

As several people have pointed out, many people haven't had the experience the OP describes.  Either because their transactions have never been challenged or because their bank has, so far, easier systems for verification.

The OP, it seems to me, has two issues therefore. 

The first that something about their transactions (no idea what) triggers alerts too often.  This is not normal, and should not be normal.  Either there's something wrong with the bank's algorithms or there is some odd (from the bank's point of view) pattern of spending by the OP.  That might be addressable by the OP.

The second that their bank's systems require such onerous checking.  My experience of such checks is entirely different - a text with a yes and no, or a phone call simply asking for confirmation after normal security checks, or a facility to confirm via an app. 

Perhaps I've been lucky and maybe all banks do the onerous system in some circumstances - thorn737 implies this in the post above mine here.  But it's never been an issue for me yet and I've had many challenged transactions.

For the OP the most obvious, to my mind, thing to do, if the issue really is that bad is to either change bank or simply use more than one bank, splitting spend between them, so that the numbers of transactions are fewer in each.  Which might (or might not!) help.

Or, as warby68 suggested higher up the thread, pay with a credit card, which will have a different (I assume) system of checking things which might be an easier system.  And can be paid off from the current account without (I assume) the bank saying 'is this you?'.



 

Daliah

OP, it will have zero effect to moan about this on an internet forum. You could try your luck with a different bank, or you could put a formal complaint to your existing bank.

I must say, it appears rather strange that both, your wife and yourself are experiencing these problems, with different banks, whilst there have been no such reports from others. There are two explanations: you either have very unusual spending patterns, or you are hypersensitive to the checks. A third option, that two different banks are targeting both of you unfairly, is so unlikely that I would discard it as an explanation.

wmb194

Sometimes these things are triggered if your IP address is varying e.g., using a VPN and/or cookies in your browser are being deleted. A poster on this forum recently told us that their online transactions are often checked if they use their work internet as all the traffic is routed via France.

[Deleted User]

Daliah said:

OP, it will have zero effect to moan about this on an internet forum. You could try your luck with a different bank, or you could put a formal complaint to your existing bank.

I must say, it appears rather strange that both, your wife and yourself are experiencing these problems, with different banks, whilst there have been no such reports from others. There are two explanations: you either have very unusual spending patterns, or you are hypersensitive to the checks. A third option, that two different banks are targeting both of you unfairly, is so unlikely that I would discard it as an explanation.

The most likely reason is there's some entirely innocent factor that an algorithm has determined is important (for reasons unknown) and which keeps triggering the warning. Nobody will know what this is as you're dealing with AI - the bank could probably find out if they cared to explore it in detail but they have no incentive to do so.

This is an inevitable consequence of the use of AI/machine learning - it will work for most people but a small number will consistently get false positives without doing anything wrong. If you're one of the unfortunate dots on the wrong side of a margin then it's unlikely there's much you can do.

I think pretending this is an easy fix or that it's someone's fault for doing something suspicious is the wrong approach - that used to be the case a decade ago perhaps, but not anymore. You can avoid doing obviously odd things like having highly unusual spending patterns, but you're ultimately trying to second guess an algorithm you know nothing about. Banks have calibration tools they can adjust to make algorithms less sensitive, but as I said above they don't have much incentive to do that.

It's a legitimate consumer issue in my opinion and one that I think we're going to be talking about a lot more in future: i.e. that every AI system ultimately generates losers because it's an imperfect tool.

y3sitsm3

Deleted_User said:

Daliah said:

OP, it will have zero effect to moan about this on an internet forum. You could try your luck with a different bank, or you could put a formal complaint to your existing bank.

I must say, it appears rather strange that both, your wife and yourself are experiencing these problems, with different banks, whilst there have been no such reports from others. There are two explanations: you either have very unusual spending patterns, or you are hypersensitive to the checks. A third option, that two different banks are targeting both of you unfairly, is so unlikely that I would discard it as an explanation.

The most likely reason is there's some entirely innocent factor that an algorithm has determined is important (for reasons unknown) and which keeps triggering the warning. Nobody will know what this is as you're dealing with AI - the bank could probably find out if they cared to explore it in detail but they have no incentive to do so.

This is an inevitable consequence of the use of AI/machine learning - it will work for most people but a small number will consistently get false positives without doing anything wrong. If you're one of the unfortunate dots on the wrong side of a margin then it's unlikely there's much you can do.

I think pretending this is an easy fix or that it's someone's fault for doing something suspicious is the wrong approach - that used to be the case a decade ago perhaps, but not anymore. You can avoid doing obviously odd things like having highly unusual spending patterns, but you're ultimately trying to second guess an algorithm you know nothing about. Banks have calibration tools they can adjust to make algorithms less sensitive, but as I said above they don't have much incentive to do that.

It's a legitimate consumer issue in my opinion and one that I think we're going to be talking about a lot more in future: i.e. that every AI system ultimately generates losers because it's an imperfect tool.

But so do "rules" in general.

There are always going to be fringe cases that don't quite fit, and as a result, people lose out, but there's never going to be much of an incentive for a large company to deal with the exceptions because they're disproportionately costly.

This isn't an AI issue, it's a money issue.