Not So Flat

Although I haven’t got­ten around to read­ing it yet, the basic premise for The World is Flat is that with glob­al­iza­tion and the Inter­net, the world is becom­ing “flat” because phys­i­cal dis­tance and national bor­ders are becom­ing more and more mean­ing­less, and your abil­ity to inter­act with any other per­son in the world is increas­ing. Well, Wells Fargo doesn’t want that to happen!

Remem­ber my post from about a week ago about how I couldn’t get my order for Kasper­sky Anti-​Virus to go through? At first I thought it was just their stu­pid extra secu­rity imple­men­ta­tion for Visa cards. The next day, though, I went to Taque­ria Davis for $1 taco and beer night (Davis’ best night of the week, in my opin­ion ) and my card was declined again!

At this point, I thought it’s because I had set an “account thresh­old” where Wells Fargo was sup­posed to send me a mes­sage telling me I’m a lit­tle light on funds. (Kinda like the low fuel light on a car.) And I thought, well, maybe this is just an annoy­ing “hid­den fea­ture” that they won’t let me spend money until I get my bal­ance above the thresh­old again.

So, I called up Wells Fargo to make sure my account was OK and that I’d be able to use it to pay rent, it being the 31^st of the month and all. The first banker I talked to told me that my card had been flagged by the Fraud Depart­ment because of “a change in my spend­ing habits.” Annoy­ing as fuck, and I have the bad luck of mak­ing pur­chases that are very sim­i­lar to what criminally-​inclined geeks would make. I ask to be trans­fered to the Fraud Depart­ment, and the guy there tells me that my card was flagged because I was try­ing to buy from Kasper­sky, and they are in a for­eign country.

This is just ridicu­lous to me! First off, there’s the prin­ci­ple of the mat­ter. The point of a debit or credit card is avoid delays and has­sles like this. And sec­ond, Kasper­sky is based in Eng­land, America’s favorite butt-​buddy for the last two cen­turies. It’s not like I’m try­ing to wire money to Iran, America’s ex who we no longer rec­og­nize or acknowl­edge in any way. Finally, they are a rep­utable com­pany; I’m sure there’s hun­dreds of much shadier web­sites based in the US to which you could send money and not get flagged. Wells Fargo needs to get with the times!

Tags: America, Dinhternet, Internet