[kevinconroy]

No, there are no such provisions. The card companies have their own fraud prevention/detection departments which mine transactions and look for abnormal behavior. If they spot something out of the ordinary (big purchase, foreign purchase, etc) then they will call you to validate.

[mjwhansen]

Anecdote: I used to work with donation processing, and we had a situation where we had transactions that I knew we're identity theft (email addresses were the same, IP the same, but zip, CVV, name correct, and all submitted in a short timeframe). I refunded the transactions and called the banks to report that the cards had been stolen, and the banks basically threw their hands up in the air.

[kevinconroy]

I work with donation processing. We found the same response from the banks, so we've started trying to look up the identify theft victims in the white pages and calling them. Sadly, we only get a 20% hit rate for working phone numbers and typically only get in touch with half of them.

[bigd]

Which is why, every time I travel, I end up with all the cards blocked. I hate you visa.

[vidarh]

My bank has done the same in the past, but now the offer an interface in online banking to inform them when I'm travelling.

It still annoys me though: Their fraud system keeps flagging regular transactions that I've done for similar amounts to the same companies, at the same times of month or year for years, yet when someone did two transfers of 3000 GBP each to a credit card account in a different bank that I've never dealt with before, in someone elses name, their fraud system did not trigger...

From my perspective, their blocks are nothing but a nuisance.

[yummyfajitas]

Call before you go and tell them you are traveling.

[Daniel_Newby]

Somewhere I read that such a call triggers a fraud red alert.

[ycombobreaker]

That would be counterintuitive. I always inform my bank before traveling out of the country. They want to know the destination nation and a date range, which is necessary to avoid triggering red flags when "card present" transactions start showing up from an unexpected location.