Descarga.com - Trouble?

[JSngry]

I recently referred a friend to Descarga.com for a deep dive into Latin recordings and his order triggered a credit card fraud alert. It's been years since I used these guys, Has the site been hacked or hijacked or anything?

The only thing that hurts more than a good site gone bad is unknowingly referring a friend to that site.

[jazzbo]

One of my credit cards automatically stops my card and gives me a fraud message every time I order from amazon.fr or amazon.de or amazon.co.uk

The other credit card company does the same thing when I order from cdjapan.co.jp

None of these companies are being fraudulent. I have to call or answer a call and "approve" the purchases. I once reached someone and said "I do business with these companies and they treat me right, please don't put my card on hold when I do." "Okay" they said. Still happens more often than not.

[Dave Garrett]

Yeah, more likely than not it's not the site itself that's the problem, but the fact that it was a site that he'd never purchased anything from before flagged it as an outlier in his usual usage pattern for that card, triggering the fraud alert. I've had the same experience as Lon, with one particular card triggering a fraud alert every time I place an order from an overseas vendor with it, despite having ordered from that vendor on multiple occasions previously.

Another data point: my wife is travelling this week, and I got a VM from her bank requesting a return call. I immediately suspected that multiple out-of-state purchases on her card had triggered a fraud alert, which she confirmed after speaking to them. CC companies (and banks) closely track usage patterns, and it doesn't take much of a deviation from those usage patterns to raise a red flag. When that happens, they will frequently put a temporary freeze on the card in question until they can reach the cardholder to confirm that the card hasn't been stolen or otherwise compromised. 

[JSngry]

Yeah, I get the concerned confirm calls too, but from what this guy said, the site had been flagged as bad or something like that, like it was a hard stop for the fraud people. I hope thats not the case, because that site is so rich...or was?

[Dan Gould]

It's not even out of state purchases necessarily. After we moved 170 miles to central Florida, I couldn't purchase a desk chair at Staples in Plant City using my Amex card.  With the floor mat it was like $200 total and I thought the inability to get the card to go thru was ridiculous.  

And I've used Amex successfully for CDjapan purchases, too.