‘Unusual transactions’

If you intend to use a credit card anywhere you seldom visit, it would be wise to notify the card issuer before leaving on your trip. My credit was suspended when the card company noticed “some unusual transactions.”

I took a tour to Kamchatka in Siberia, July 3-18, ’03, using my card twice on the trip. The card worked fine then and on the day after I returned, but a week after getting home I had to leave four bags of groceries in the market because my credit card was “not accepted” at checkout. This was both embarrassing and inconvenient.

One phone call got my credit restored. During this call I easily convinced the young man with whom I spoke that I really had charged the $40 worth of reindeer bone jewelry at a folk craft outlet in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatski, Siberia (near the end of my tour), and really had made the phone calls from Anchorage and Minneapolis two days later on the way home.

The young man said that someone had tried to call me when the “unusual transactions” were noticed, but “The phone was busy. You could not be reached.” Four days later I received notification in the mail that my “account security had possibly been compromised.”

ALICE RAWLES
Richmond, VA