Declined and denied

Over the past week we have been dealing with bizarro world credit card/bankcard issues.

In the US, it is common to have a debit card that is tied to your bank account but can also be used as a Visa or MasterCard. Here in Canada, that is not so common. However, our local credit union offers a MasterCard debit card, and this is what we use for almost all of our purchases. We also have debit/bank cards, but I don't even know my pin, because the MasterCard debit functions exactly the same, but can also be used as a credit card (e.g., for online purchases where a chip and pin debit doesn't work), and we earn "choice rewards" points which we can use for travel, gift cards to stores we shop at, or merchandise.

So imagine my surprise at having my card declined with a basket full of purchases and a long line of customers behind me. I tried to use my regular debit card but got locked out after unsuccessfully trying three different pin numbers that were all wrong, and had no other way to pay for my purchases. I left them in a bag at the cash register, and tried calling the number on the back of the card. The guy I talked to said that they were blocking my purchases, but had no record of why, and after talking to his supervisor said he had fixed it. So I went back to the cash register, waited again for my turn in line, and tried once again to make my purchase. Still declined. I finally realized that I had an American credit card in my wallet, and successfully used that to complete my transaction.

After another long conversation with the same customer service agent (just good luck – he was at a call center in India so it was surprising to both of us when I reached him the second time), it was determined that for no reason on record both my card and Jeff's card were being completely blocked, and we would have to go to the bank to order new cards.

Jeff went to the bank, and the person he spoke to insisted that his card was fine. So Jeff went to the ATM to test it out, and he received a message that said "UN-AUTHORIZED ACCESS" and the machine ate his card. Jeff went back to the same person who apparently was so shocked by this that he was literally speechless with his mouth open. Jeff was lucky enough to be able to speak to the regional manager, who was able to see something on the account that no one else could see – somewhere there was a fake/erroneous record of me calling to report fraud. The best guess about what happened is that Jeff ran his card at a business where fraud had occurred at some point, and even though there was no fraud on our card, they ended up shutting our access off completely without telling us. So now we are supposed to receive our new cards in a week to ten days, and in the meantime I have to find other ways to make purchases (I should probably somehow get to the bank during their ridiculously short open hours to reset my debit card pin, but this can be challenging during a full work week).

This is the short version of the story. There are actually many more phone calls that both Jeff and I made, with people insisting that our cards were fine. I imagine this is probably one of the most boring blog posts I have written, but it was an important part of our week :-)

In other news, Jeff's VCR broke, which he was very distraught about because he has some VHS tapes that are completely unique or very rare and not available anywhere else or in other formats. So, I did a quick search and found someone selling a used VCR which Jeff just bought and brought home. It apparently came with quite an interesting collection of tapes, which I am now going to check out!