I rely a lot on VPN services, primary to masquerade myself as being located in another country, specifically, pretending to be from US and Europe to bypass content filters, allowing myself to access the likes of Hulu. Another use is for picking optimal network routes to reduce latency when connecting to game servers outside my region. I tend to leave my VPN connected even when I’m done, since there’s no reason to disconnect.
The trouble arises when I start doing online purchases with my credit card while on these VPNs. It must look pretty suspicious to someone over at VISA, seeing as to how purchases originating from Germany, Sweden, and the United States are all using the same card, and hence, tripped their fraud detection mechanism and shutting down my card. I wish there was some way I could explain the above to the customer service agent when I called my bank up this morning, but I don’t think I could have put it in way that would make myself be understood and encourage them to lift the fraud protection.
So here I am, waiting to be issued a new card, and wanting to blame the fraud detection algorithm for placing too much weight on IP geolocation. Then again, who could have thought?