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MASTERCARD IS TESTING out a new service to help protect purchases made on credit cards abroad by using your smartphone’s location.
The service, which is in pilot mode and requires cardholders to opt-in, will only allow card transactions when users have their smartphone switched on in that general location.
The idea is if you’re in Dublin and someone tries to use your card in London, the transaction would be rejected since it knows you’re not in the same location.
The aim is to help reduce fraud and help credit card companies make faster decisions. Said companies can check the location of your smartphone to see if you’re in the same place as your card, and approve or reject a transaction using that information.
Mastercard is considering offering prepaid data packages as well which phones users can purchase when they arrive at their destination. It sees this as an opportunity to allow businesses and mobile networks to provide targeted offers and coupons to those using the service.
The service is being developed by both Mastercard and telecommunications service company Syniverse, but neither company has said when they plan to make it available.
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It’s not going to work as most people don’t have data on while abroad due to the huge cost. If you did turn data on for this to work the amount of background apps phoning home in the background could leave you with a big bill.
Kevin.
Most people are not roaming 90% of the time. so it’ll work in that if Pablo in Nigeria, london, kerry, arklow try to use my card while I’m in Dublin. it’ll trigger an alert.
They dont need data turned on, they just need the phone to be turned on. It uses the mobile network itself to identify the location.
I suppose it would be usual for people to be in their home country when the card would be cloned and used abroad. A great idea.
Wonder what the data charge on that will be
”priceless”
Note to pickpockets, make sure you take the phone as well as the wallet.
You won’t be charged as it only uses GPS to determine your location, and doesn’t require any data usage.
Not true. If it used GPS then there would be a need for a data connection for the device to return the GPS coordinates, and in any case this approach would be open to fraud where a device could be modified to return false data.
It’s likely that this will use the same telecoms signalling procedures which are used to locate the phone when delivering a text message. These procedures predate GPS on the phone by decades, but have less granularity then GPS.
GPS needs well a GPS receiver – like de car sat nav. Location services need connection to phone network.
You’re abroad, you know your will be dead!
have your say