In the meantime, 
September 05, 2010
A modest proposal for credit card companies
Iwas thinking, which I usually do when I have nothing better to do, and I was wondering about credit card fraud.
Years ago, the family’s credit card number was stolen online through software that downloaded keylogger software onto the computer. The usual non-hilarity ensued: $8,000 charged through the card (including several thousand-dollar charges to something called “Indonesia Airlines”), the password on my Earthlink e-mail account changed and blocked. The guy even had the audacity to send himself eight British pounds to himself, reasonable secure in the knowledge that I won’t spend several hundred dollars to fly over and punch him in the face.
I was fortunate that my thieves weren’t malicious, just greedy. The account was cancelled. I filed the paperwork to keep from paying the charges to “Indonesia Airlines.” I installed better security software.
But it still irked me that the credit card companies don’t seem to worry about the millions of dollars siphoned off this way, and the public’s generally low opinion of them. To them, it’s “just a part of doing business,” and if the customer takes it in the shorts, well, as someone once said:
So, here’s my modest proposal to the credit card companies: allow the owner to “deactivate” certain uses of their card.
For example, I’m reasonably certain that I would never, over the span of 10 minutes, transfer eight thousand dollars to any company, never mind a (presumable) company overseas. Call me unaware, but I can’t imagine anything short of a bizarre ransom demand by kidnappers that make me do that.
What I envision is this: Each cardholder has access to the account online that would allow him to turn off and on certain rules that the credit card company can easily detect.
They can be:
a. No overseas payments.
b. No cash payments.
c. No payments over a certain amount.
d. No repeat charges to the same account within a certain time period.
e. If you’re a woman with access to your husband’s account, no payments to any company with the words “Gentlemen’s Club,” “Entertainment,” or “Lap Dances” in the title.
For the ultimate in opt-out security, perhaps you could specify only the companies you would use the card for. For example, Amazon pretty much takes care of all my department store needs except for my local bookstore. I could have great fun with that. I would send my account number to a hundred Nigerian scammers just to imagine them all crowded at the Lagos equivalent of Wal-Mart, getting their purchases blocked. That would make my day.
Best of all from the credit card company’s point of view, they wouldn’t have to do much more than set up the rules. They already allow you access to your account. The card’s owner would be responsible for going into the account and flicking the switches off and on. If there’s a problem ─ say you wanted to buy a book from a British bookseller ─ it would be simple to go into your account, change the rule, make the payment, then change the rule back.
It wouldn’t eliminate all credit card abuse. The scammers could probably develop workarounds eventually. But they’d have to waste their time doing it, and those people who truly care about keeping their treasury secure would be given a lock that might help.
Can’t hurt.
* The Stationers' Register records on this day in 1667 an entry for "Paradise Lost," a poem in blank verse by John Milton, who was in a sad state at this time of life. He was 59 and had been blind for 15 years. He had buried his first wife 15 years ago and his second six years after that. His support for Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth nearly cost him his head. Instead, it cost him his published works, some of which were burned in his stead.
* On this day in 1858, the Linnean Society of London published two papers in its magazine that had been presented at a meeting six weeks before. By most accounts, it had been a dull gathering on July 1. The members seemed more interested in honoring the death of the society's former president than to engage in scientific inquiry. Eight scientific papers were read from the podium, and during the socializing afterwards, one visitor noted that there was "no semblance of a discussion." In fact, the president of the society observed that the year observed that 1858 had not "been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak, the department of science on which they bear."
* No thanks, Ken Levine. There’s nothing so dull going on in my life that would make 