But what do you do when you find a "charge" that you didn't make?
ANC On The Money's resident financial adviser Salve Duplito said to contest your credit card billing, just call your bank's hotline and make a complaint.
The bank will investigate your complaint by looking at the signature used in the transaction. If the investigation showed there was indeed a fraudulent transaction or a system error, the bank will reverse the charges.
Alex Ilagan, executive director of the Credit Card Association of the Philippines, said most banks would temporarily reverse the charges as soon as you complain. This would mean you will not incur any interest and penalties while the investigation ins on-going.
Banks' investigations usually take some time. One possibility is another bank processed the transaction, which means your bank would need to coordinate with the other bank.
Duplito said the process can also become more complicated if the charges were incurred overseas.
She also reminded cardholders not to delay their complaints, or else the window where they can contest the charges will close.
"You must call the bank within 2 weeks after the statement date. Most cardholders get their billing statement a week after the statement date, so you only have effectively around a week to make sure your statement is accurate," she said.
Duplito said she did an informal survey and found most people don't check their credit card billing statements.
"What's alarming about this is the anecdotal increase in credit card fraud recently. If you were victimized by fraudsters and you didn't check your billing, you just keep on paying for their shopping sprees and not know it," she said.
Ilagan said it is every cardholder's responsibility to double check their bills and correct tghem if there are any errors.
He said the most common problem of cardholders is failing to recognize the company name on credit card bills. Some merchants use a different company name in billing statements, which add to the confusion.
Duplito suggested cardholders create a "budget tracking system" to keep track of their expenses, including credit card transactions. This will make it easy to double-check the accuracy of your billing statement at the end of the month.
However, it's a different case if you lose your credit card and charges were made before you discovered this and reported it to the credit card company.
"Card companies must simply waive charges for all errors and fraudulent transactions even before a card is reported as stolen. After all, they reversecharges from a card victimized via skimming. That's almost teh same as somebody stealing your card from you physically," Duplito said.
Most of these problems are likely to lessen when credit card companies shift to a chip-based or EMV cards, but this will happend in 2017.
She noted hybrid-EMV cards are still be vulnerable to fraud, so the only way to go is purely EMV cards.
"Closely watch which banks and merchants truly walk the talk of valuing their customers. Those are the companies that will put their money where their mouths are and be the first to shift to a purely chip-based card," she said.
source: www.abs-cbnnews.com
