Why would a credit card company reject a transaction for suspected fraud, but not contact me?

Question

My bank offers a debit card, which I can use to perform online purchases. Recently, I tried to purchase clothing online, but the card was declined. I was certain that I had enough funds on the card, so I checked online and indeed, I had way more on my bank account than the sum of the purchase (which in and of itself was quite low, under 100€).

I repeated my attempt to purchase the clothing, but I got rejected again. I waited several day, then attempted the purchase again. And yet again, I was rejected. So I called my bank and asked why my purchases are getting rejected. My bank contact told me the charges were rejected because they were marked as possibly fraudulent (which they weren't).

I asked why I was not informed by the credit card company - after all, they suspected my card was stolen. My bank contact could not answer that.

So my question is: If my credit card company believes that my card was stolen, why are they not contacting me? And if they don't believe my card was stolen, why would my payment to a commonly known online store be rejected?

Answer 1

If my credit card company believes that my card was stolen, why are they not contacting me?

They don't believe the card was stolen, they believe the transaction was unauthorized.

Usually this happens automatically through some fraud detection system in your bank that analyzes transactions and usage patterns and tries to make an educated guess as to whether the transaction is genuine or not.

The goal is to avoid liability for the bank, so if the transaction is suspected to be fraudulent - it is rejected. If it is important enough for you - you'll call yourself, just as you did. Adding a human into the process to call every affected cardholder on any affected transaction would be cost prohibitive, and the goal after all is to reduce costs.