Card declined!

Yesterday I had my Mastercard declined at the petrol station. This was somewhat surprising as I was massively under my limit and pat on time by direct debit monthly.

I phjoned up BNZ and they said a freeze had been placed on the card due to a suspicious transaction(s). However the only two they had was $12 to Pod for coffee and $15 to the Companies Office for my company annual return.

I thought their fraud detection programme was somewhat oversensitive.

However had a call this morning that there had been $6,000 of transactions from Japan and Malaysia – neither places I have been to in recent years.

BNZ of course are not charging me, and have cancelled the card. Rather a pain as I pay absolutely everything on it (airpoints are nice) so will have a lot of direct debits to change.

Always knew there was a reason I kept my Visa card open – makes a nice backup.