To combat fraud, credit card companies are much more likely to place a freeze on a credit card account if a purchase falls outside your normal use. What does this look like?

• You take a trip out of state, say driving across the border and fill up your car at a gas station. The card company has no record of you being in that area, and so it flags this as unusual behavior. Perhaps a thief has your card?
• You make a small online purchase. For example, to set up a child e-mail account, Yahoo requires the parent to charge their credit card by fifty cents. My account was frozen when I did this recently, and I had to call the fraud hotline to verify that the charge was legitimate.
• You travel to a foreign country without telling your credit card company in advance.
• You make a series of purchases for things you do not usually by. For instance, you’ve never bought woman’s lingerie. Until your credit card company intuits this new pattern (maybe you recently got engaged) this may put a freeze on your account.

A Frozen Credit Card

For debit cards, the issue is the hold that happens whenever you pay for something with a signature purchase in which the vendor does not know in advance exactly how much your purchase will be, but you can access the service or product in advance of payment. The two most common situations are renting a hotel room or gasing up your car. For gas purchases at the pump, typically a hold of $50 or as much as $75 is immediately put through, meaning you need to have that much money in your card account to avoid having the purchase being denied at the point of purchase. If you logged into your card account after making a $20 gas purchase, for example, you would see the charge as $75 perhaps for a few hours or maybe even a day or two before the actual amount was registered and the difference credited back to your account. For hotels, the “hold” would be much higher to cover a night’s room rate, say $150 or $200.

Susan Stellin writing in the New York Times spoke to a credit card company about the freeze she experienced when buying gas out of state:  

I was surprised that a cheap gas purchase in California could also freeze my account, so I called U.S. Bank to find out if travelers need to start alerting their banks about their domestic travels, which seemed like overkill to me.

It probably is, said Dave Leiker, a senior vice president with U.S. Bank. He told me that besides watching for unusual spending patterns, banks also monitor where criminals use stolen cards, places like automated payment kiosks in metropolitan areas.

“We may have been seeing a trend where the bad guys were out there using stolen credit cards at gas pumps,” he said.

NPR today featured a story out of the UK on the fact that more people stay loyal to their bank (an average of 16 years) than their marriage. I don’t know if this stat holds true for the United States but I suspect it does.Consumers in general are very brand loyal. The idea is that if you can get a consumer to stick with your brand early on he or she will stay with you for years and years, until you give them a reason to stray, or something more compelling comes along. What would be more compelling than their favorite brand? New technology? Buzz? A feature people realize they simply must have.

In college I was handed a box of personal grooming freebies that included Mennen Speed Stick deodorant, a Trac II razor, and Edge shaving cream. Guess what? I still use all three brands. I finally switched to the five blade razor models just this year when I forgot my razor on a business trip. Still, I agonized in the aisle of CVS studying the razors until I finally took the plunge.

Why do people stick with their bank for so long? Here are the top five reasons people stick with a brand according to another study in the UK by a marketing firm.

1. Consistently high quality products
2. Helpful, knowledgeable staff
3. Easy to contact the company
4. Every aspect of the brand experience is enjoyable
5. Customers are recognized and valued when they call customer support

So, credit card and prepaid debit card companies should pay attention to what their customers want, and they can extend loyalty years out. Perhaps couples could learn from banks and work on being “helpful” and “easy to talk to.”

Looking for a prepaid debit card at Rite Aid? Or are you wondering if your local Rite Aid has Greendot MoneyPaks for reloading your prepaid card. The answer is yes on both counts. Continuing our series on where to find MoneyPaks to reload your MiCash Prepaid MasterCard, here are some facts about this drug store chain.

• Rite Aid Corp. is the third largest pharmacy chains in America with nearly 4,800 stores in 31 states.
• You are more likely to find a Rite Aid on the East or West coast. In fact Rite Aid is the largest drugstore chain on the East Coast
• Find the company on the New York Stock Exchange under the stock ticker RAD.
• Rite Aid’s first store opened in September 1962 as Thrif D Discount Center in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Greendot MoneyPaks at Rite Aid

So, when you come through the big glass doors at your local Rite Aid, make a beeline for prepaid card kiosk. There you will find Money Paks hanging in their bright green packages. For just $4.95 you can put a bunch of cash on a MoneyPak, then call Greendot’s customer service phone number or go online to move that money onto a prepaid card. Why not use the MoneyPak for making purchases? Well, other than eBay and a few other places, merchants don’t accept MoneyPaks. They are not branded Visa or MasterCard to function on those debit card network. However, it is swift and easy to use a Greendot MoneyPak as a means to get your cash onto your prepaid card.

Law enforcement and security experts are trying to stay ahead of thieves who are using a “skimmer” device to steal debit and credit card numbers. While not yet widespread, it is something that you should be aware of. Here’s how it works. Thieves will open up equipment where a credit or debit MasterCard or Visa is swiped and place a skimmer device in the path of the card reader. For example when you push your card into a gas station pump card reader, a skimmer would be installed so that your card skims over and is read by this hacker tool as it is also read by the gas pump as part of your transaction process. Once that happens, and the thieves retrieve your card number, they have stolen it and can use it for purposes of identity theft. They can also make unauthorized purchases with your card.

How can thieves install this device? First they mustbe able to open up a locked panel of the gas pump.  They can do this with a stolen or duplicated master key for the pumps, used by service technicians. They then have to be able to install the device quickly and exit the scene without getting caught on security cameras. They don’t have to go back to the skimmer to get the numbers but can retrieve them with a simple bluetooth wireless transmission from a hidden nearby spot.

For other devices, such as a movie rental kiosk or touch pad card reader, they simply add a skimmer device that blends in physically with the look of the card reader. This can also be done on ATM machines where thieves install a small camera to also record your PIN number via wireless video as you key it in.

Illegal card skimmer attached to blend in.

Red Box DVD rental kiosks have been known to be modified with skimmer devices that are the same black color as the legitimate card reader. According to Brian Krebs, a security expert who tracks these cases,

Customers who suspect their local Redbox may have been tampered with should contact 630-756-8866, e-mail alerts At redbox.com or notify the manager of the store or restaurant that houses the machine.

Card reader devices are continually being modified to stay one step ahead of this thieving technology, but small merchants in particular aren’t always able to update their gas pumps or PIN pad machines on a regular basis.

Greendot Available at CVS

If you are looking for a fast and easy way to load money on your MiCash debit MasterCard using Greendot MoneyPaks look no farther than your local CVS pharmacy. There are more than 7,000 CVS locations nationwide. This makes it the largest pharmacy chain in the country. CVS Facts:

• Headquarters located in Woonsocket, R.I.
• More than $87 billion in annual revenue
• Largest employer of Pharmacists and Nurse Practitioners
• No. 1 in Store Count – more than 7,000 CVS/pharmacy stores in 43 states (includes Longs Drugs in Hawaii)
• 4+ million customers per day

All you have to do is walk into the store and find the gift card and prepaid card rack on an end-cap of one of the aisles near the check out register. You can’t miss it. Look for the Greendot package which not surprisingly is green! Take the Moneypak to the register, hand the cashier your cash, and minus the cost of the Moneypak (i.e., you will have converted your cash to the MoneyPak. Now, you can’t use a MoneyPak for direct purchases of products. Rather it is just a convenient way to transfer money to a prepaid card. So the next step is to call the Greendot customer service number printed on the MoneyPak and over the phone provide the unique Greendot identifier number and your prepaid card account number. This 16-digit number is embossed on the front of your prepaid card.  Greendot will be able to see how much money you just put on your card, and transfer the entire balance to your prepaid card. After you have depleted the one-time-use MoneyPak, you can toss it in the nearest trash can. It has served its purpose.