Well they did answer all my questions and I seemed to have a chance to hold them back. But they kept returning to “but you don’t recognize the transaction…” Since they fed me misinfo, I was trapped. If there really had been a fraud transaction for the full amount of the credit, I would not want to be on record as saying it’s legit.

I guess it’s really a fucked up UI the bankers are using. Another banker also insisted that the huge transaction was in fact a transaction and could not be convinced otherwise. So multiple bankers are making the same mistake. But one banker pointed out: yes it looks like a transaction on our screen, but then there is a “category” of purchase. E.g. instead of something like “sporting goods”, the category is “balance inquiry”. So the UI is a piece of shit and the bankers are not trained to look at the purchase category to find that it’s not actually the kind of transaction where money moves.

The software is garbage if someone can tag a balance inquiry as “fraud” and not at least ask the operator if they are sure a balance inquiry is fraud. In principle any activity not recognized should be tagable as fraud, but there should be double checks and extra confirmations if it does not involve money movement.

Next time this happens, I will say “what is the category of the transaction”?

Yeah, overall good advice. But there are very few cards that give the same exchange rate. Most cards are 3%. I have some shitty alternate options with unknown surprises (since I never use them abroad, I have to find out do they need a travel notice… Will the AI bots be more trigger happy on fraud suspicion? Different ATM limits… different ways of treating cash back, etc) It’s a mess- Not how I want to spend my time.

Amex is much more commonly accepted than Diners Club, but Amex has the worst exchange rates.

From the US, in Europe.

I doubt it. Well, I have a laptop with dead LCD backlight which could perhaps be an always-on headless server with an SSD. But the uplink would have to be a GSM modem on a prepaid plan. I guess it’s feasible if the constantly running tor machinery is lean enough on the network. Not sure I can take on another project.