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.