Barclaycard problems

Barclaycard's fraud prevention team are destroying their business, I think.

In the summer I bought a holiday. I got a call one evening from Barclaycard telling me that they had declined the payment, since it was unusual and made overseas. I had to call up the holiday company and tell them to take the money again. This was a pain, but not unreasonable since the holiday company (for reasons known to themselves) had a payment processing company in Belgium.

Yesterday I tried to buy a laptop from Dell. Last night I got The Call. Barclaycard had decided to decline that payment too. Would I ring up Dell and tell them to take the money again. My experience doing that is detailed in the following post, but of course I couldn't get any cooperation. So I decided to cancel the order, and, since Dell were in such a mess, to make sure that the money was blocked.

I ring up Barclaycard, and have to listen endlessly to their robot system. Eventually I get through to someone who listens and blandly tells me that they can't block any payment from Dell -- why not? they did yesterday! -- and that if one is made I should just raise a claim. Well, that was worth sitting in a queue for!

Barclaycard ARE good for chargebacks. But I don't use a creditcard in order to have to ring up and confirm every purchase.