So what scenario is the agent hypothesizing? The person at the old number was actually the identity thief, and used the account for maybe several years without any challenge, before the actual owner changed the number back? That makes not the slightest bit of sense to me.

I think if the phone number has recently been changed, and you call the old number, and the person who answers can answer any question at all about themselves, you have to figure that's the account owner. Who else could it be???

Man breaks up with his partner, and moves out of their shared home. He changes his phone number to be his new home.

Amex calls the old number, gets the old partner who is particularly vindictive and decides to answer the questions as well as he can.

When I worked in banking we had all sorts of issues about how we handled change of address with respect to relationship breakdown.

If a husband and wife share and account and share an address do you send them separate statements, or combine them? If the husband tells you he has changed address, do you assume the wife has changed too or assume that she's still at the old address? If he's on the phone, you can ask him but do you assume he's telling the truth?

If one member of a relationship chooses to change their mailing address, for security reasons, you might want to send a notice to their old address in case the change was fraudulent - but if they've changed their address because they're fleeing an abusive relationship then you can't send anything to the old address that indicates what the new address is. And just because someone at the old address raises an objection to the change that doesn't mean it was wrong, just that you need to do more investigation.

Those sorts of incidents were rare, but our procedures needed to plan for them. And in this case, the correct action would be to lock the account and escalate to a superior.

People want the ability to have joint accounts. A joint account generally has a credit limit set by the income of the higher-paid (or wealthier) of the two but allows both people to have a card and make payments. Imagine a simple scenario: one spouse works, the other does not; the one who doesn't work often does the shopping.

They're also very important for mortgages. If the mortgaged asset is jointly owned (and that's typically the case in a marriage) then you, in practice, need all owners to be a party to the loan. The house is security on the loan - if I only own half the house then I can only borrow against my half. And my wife can borrow against her half. But if I default on my loan, then how does my bank foreclose on me and sell their asset when there is another owner who may not wish to sell.

There are other solutions, but the easiest, and the one that banks will typically insist on is a joint asset requires a joint loan

Joint credit cards, which aren't attached to any asset, don't have much benefit compared to this downside. What people are typically told is happening is that the credit card still 'belongs' to one spouse, but the other will be also authorized to 'use' it. While this is possible, the paperwork presented to sign often makes the other spouse jointly liable for the debt instead. I'm convinced even the bank representatives don't know they are setting up things this way and are just following a script. You have to read the paperwork to see what it does.

I suppose a temporary convenience now is worth a very complicated situation in the future. Thus is also why we traditionally forego prenuptial agreements.

Also I don't pay 1/2 my mortgage and my wife pays the other 1/2 we pay it all together (from the one account). We actually turned down an account with Plastic because no shared accounts.

We each have an individual credit card but that's more for tracking if we are meeting our own budgeting goals. But those are still linked to the other person.

Also, joint accounts make a situation where something happens to your spouse MUCH easier to handle. If something were to happen to me I'd want my wife to still be able to pay for Daycare, Mortgage, etc for as long as our savings would allow.

This is part of why divorce is hard on so many levels. The paperwork alone is crazy.

There would be one or more accounts held in the name of Super Secret Labs LLC and in most cases that business account would have rules about who was allowed to approve the transfer of funds out of the account, and to what limit. In many cases it may require approval from 2 account holders.

Prior to incorporation, the call on funds would typically be much lower, so it's probably going to be a bit ad-hoc, and might just use an account held by one of the founders with everyone throwing their share when needed. If you can't trust your cofounder with $2k, then don't start a business with them.

Cardholder changes his phone number, but telemarketers keep calling the old number. The person who now has that number receives a bunch of calls asking for the cardholder, collects a fair amount of information about him, and figures he could impersonate him.

Yeah, that sounds a bit far-fetched. But remember that when people change their phone number, they usually don't remain available at their old number for long. So someone at the old number claiming to be the cardholder could have been a red flag, too.

In fact, in the couple of years since I've had my current phone number, I've managed to learn a fair amount about the person who had that number before me, mostly via telemarketers. Where they lived, where they were planning to relocate to, where they used to shop, what their interests were, etc.

Anyway, Amex should have called the new number on the account to see if they get the same person. Unfortunately, they seem to have trusted caller ID too much, even when it was obvious that at least one of the people they were talking to was an impostor.

If the only ask is "please don't let that transaction go through," it makes sense for a bank to comply.

If they don't freeze your account and end up with fraudulent purchases, they probably won't lose any money anyway -- they can either charge it back to the merchant or have insurance pay for it.

> Factoring in time served and a reduction for good behavior, Naskovets got out in September 2012. He faced a deportation order that would have sent him back to Belarus. Representing himself in immigration court, he argued that he risked torture if sent home, based on his run-ins with the KGB. As a signatory to the U.N. Convention Against Torture, the U.S. cannot send someone back to a country knowing he’s likely to be tortured. An immigration judge sided with Naskovets. The government appealed. Here’s where Naskovets’s optimism proved justified. While he was buffing floors in a county prison in Pennsylvania, his case had caught the attention of Stephen Yale-Loehr, a law professor who runs an immigration clinic at Cornell. With the help of Yale-Loehr and his students, Naskovets fought Immigration and Customs Enforcement in court for two years—and in October 2014 the agency decided to let him stay.

I represented many, many individuals who were in removal proceedings (deportation) or where otherwise immediately detained while entering the US without authorization/documentation. In many instances there was a real threat to the lives of my Clients if returned to their home countries (Haiti and Columbia) that they would be killed/tortured by the political opposition and/or FARC. But they didn't hack the legal system, they availed themselves to it.

[1] http://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/refugees-asylum/asylum/obt... [2]http://www.uscis.gov/humanitarian/refugees-asylum/asylum

On the other side - that Boston gangster, "Whitey", was allowed even to kill people as long as he was informing for FBI, so immigration is just a peanuts compare to it.

Deferring to the torture risk in Belarus is such as an obvious bullshit. The only way they can torture there is by forcing you to eat their organic condensed sweetened milk.

Belarus is subject to US sanctions for “undermining democratic process and constituting an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States”.[25] It is also subject to sanctions imposed by the European Union for human-rights violations.[26] Belarus has been determined to be a habitual violator of international human-rights laws and accepted norms of international behavior by the UN, the US, the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, the Council of Europe, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the European Council, the European Parliament, the European Commission, and the NATO Parliamentary Assembly. As stated by the UN Special Rapporteur on Belarus, “it is impossible to believe that all these people are wrong or biased.”

The big problem with building a pro-immigration welfare state is that there's often no check on fraud. Bureaucrats like bigger budgets, expanding, etc and would rather just rubber stamp everything 'yes' than tackle things like fraud. Judges don't want to be labeled racist or anti-immigration, especially if they are voted in like they are in my state.

Now we're in this ugly position where we've imported all this unskilled labor and are simultaneously building automated solutions that'll make them redundant. Where will the taxi drivers and janitors go when robots replace them? Why are we importing in so much labor when U6 unemployment rates are still above 10%? What evidence do we have that this man is actually a torture risk? In Russia's sphere of influence pretty much everyone is a torture risk. That's what? 150m people?

That being said while slightly exaggerated the claim of torture in Belarus isn't far fetched. Dude in charge is pretty much a crazy dictator. I remember during the (last?) elections his main opponent was mysteriously beaten up and he said in an interview that he shouldn't whine about it like a little girl.

p.s.: How do these arrests happen, is interpol involved or can the FBI negotiate with the Czech government and just roll in there?

Not requiring a PIN is an example of this. If your customers have to memorize and enter a PIN, this added friction will cause at least some of them to pay cash (or whatever other payment method) instead. That's lost revenue.

Similarly, it shocks many people to learn that credit card merchant agreements forbid requiring customers to show ID as part of the transaction. Seems like a sensible way to fight fraud, right? But it also adds friction, which reduces credit card use rates, which hurts card company profits, so they don't let you do that.

This stuff is all a careful tradeoff. They know how much they lose to fraud, and how much they gain in legitimate transactions from making things easier. The goal is not zero fraud, but rather whatever level of fraud is optimal for their profits, which is almost certainly not zero.

This reminds me of the Potato Paradox article posted on the front page. Imagine if the card company comes up with some way to cut fraud by 50%, while the added hassle has a minor impact on legitimate transactions, reducing them by 1%. That's likely to be a significant net loss for them, because of the relative proportion of legitimate to fraudulent transactions in the first place.

They would also be saving tons of money from being able to reduce their fraud analysis and recovery staff, and they would build goodwill with not only their merchants but also their customers. I know plenty of people who still dislike using credit cards because of the potential for fraud and having their number stolen.

When you think about it, it's pretty insane how many people you probably hand your credit card to every week. Any one of those people could have a smart phone or something with the camera on, capturing the numbers on the front and back of the card. Credit card numbers are so insecure right now, it's ridiculous. If you are going to use a credit card as a consumer, you pretty much need to keep a non-stop eye on your statements. And when you actually DO get your number stolen, you have to deal with the hassle of disputing the charge and going back and forth.

Who knows? Maybe they would actually have a big upswing in credit card usage (and the resulting transaction percentage profits) if they released a "new, more secure card"?

And it's not like card companies do absolutely nothing. The US is finally moving to chips, which will cut down a lot. Notably it's just chips, not chip-and-PIN, because they want to keep that friction low. But when they are able to fight fraud while still keeping friction low, they do it.

I think the market is competitive enough that if people wanted more security, someone would offer it and it would gain in popularity. We do see this to an extent, with security features like sending transactions to your phone as they happen. In fact, a very few banks will issue you a chip-and-PIN card right now if you want it. Or you can get a debit-only card, with no credit features, so that a PIN is always required. Mostly people don't seem to care, though.

And, by the way, it's been more than 25 years since the dissolution of Soviet Union in case they haven't told you that after unfreezing you.

which stands uncorrect.