Lloyds blocking d/card pmts to encourage people to get c/cards?

Dunno. I've got a Lloyds debit card, and several credit cards - none of which are Lloyds. So they wouldn't benefit from encouraging me to use a credit card!

The only time I use a debit card (apart from cash withdrawals) is when making purchases at outfits - such as Lidl - which don't accept credit cards, or when there is a charge for using a credit card - such as when buying a car tax disc.

I don't think my debit card's ever been blocked, but I know it *can* happen. I was in a branch of Lloyds recently and there was a poor old dear in the queue in front of me in a right tizzwazz because her card had been blocked, and she had rung up to get it unblocked but had been unable to give the correct answers to the security questions asked! I don't know whether she got it sorted - she was still arguing the toss with the counter clerk when I left.

I do like a nice conspiracy theory but I think you are barking up the wrong tree with this one as people with credits cards have issues with being blocked also.

All that aside, the best way to operate is actually to use a credit card. Keep your monthly spends in an account that pays interest instead of your bank account. Use a credit card that gives cash back or points or cheap petrol or whatever and buy everything on it. At the end of the month pay the credit card bill in full.

This method is also good for seeing where your money goes as it is all laid out in a list, once a month.

Well if you get a credit card issued by other than Lloyds, then certainly Lloyds won't be blocking it. That'll solve the problem!

Indeed. I've never had a debit card blocked but it has happened to a credit card.

Good advice. You also get the protection of the consumer credit act on purchases over £100[1]

I suspect the call centre person was misreading their script. After all they are told to sell you lots of stuff you don't want every time you call ;-)

[1] This is a maximum amount but it's not usually a problem for me ;-)

That's what I do too. I've set up a Direct Debit to pay the full balance every month.

I think you also have a claim against the credit card company if the supplier takes your money and goes bankrupt, which you don't get with a debit card - I think so anyway, fortunately I've never had to use it.

It does but they are getting more active with fraud prevention and if it is indeed random then it's possible that somebody will get three in a short space of time.

Sounds like rubbish to me. The only advantage I could see is that if your debit card was blocked you could try the credit card, or vice versa.

My guess is that you were unlucky with the initial blocks and the first woman saw an opportunity to use some creativity to get her monthly quota of credit card applications.

Going back in time, at least for IT, authentication of login to servers was handled by a pool of servers running RADIUS database software. You could image "one server for surname beginning A, one server for surname beginning B" as it were. If one of the servers lost its database due to corruption or hard drive failure, it was usually recovered quite quickly - unless a complicated RAID failure occurred making recovery more difficult in terms of manual intervention & time.

I suspect VISA ACCESS use similar authentication servers and occasionally suffer an outage of a server affecting say 20,000 or

50,000 people in theory and some lesser number in practice (not everyone uses their card every hour).

Automatic recovery probably handles most failures, but more complex failures such as a network switch may take longer. So it may not be a matter of a disk failure, just an example, they probably have redundant failover servers in a complex scheme because the cost is small compared to their revenue per transaction.

I had a nauseous problem a few weeks back on all VISA cards I had (credit & debit) - neither Tesco nor Asda would process them online, it was late evening. The securecode or whatever authentication screen would not come up and would be rejected. Support from card issuers (debit, credit) & stores did not find anything wrong. It resolved the following morning, so perhaps authentication data was garbled or a network switch had failed etc.

Another time the authentication screen seems to be bounced with "let it through" without my doing anything.

Cards have replaced cash, the systems to handle them in terms of people, cards per people, authentication etc are quite large. The systems are very very robust - but not infallible. The delay makes me think human intervention is still required to physically repair systems, there is not absolute failover for a small-scale problem.

Note the £100 protection requires any item to be £100, not 100 items of £1 as I recall. Worth noting (and same with shipping because I think this might be excluded). Can not recall the precise wording. Very very well worth using the protection, remember ordering IT in the

1980s... you sent a cheque... 28 days for delivery... 25 days for them to get out of the country or get enough orders to make a bulk order, or just not fulfill the order... card protection is useful. Protection needs to be dropped to £50 though (and I can see card companies conversely wanting the level index-linked and back-dated to 1975 etc :-)