US Bank Card declined for an overseas purchase? Call the bank.

I’ve booked a number of overseas rental cars over the past couple of weeks (for trips coming up over the next year). I wanted to use my US Bank Altitude Reserve for some of the rentals and I kept running into the card getting declined (despite the absence of a fraud alert). I’ve actually had a few other declined foreign purchases recently as well despite the lack of any fraud alert from the bank. Meanwhile, other purchases in between (both locally using Google Pay and online for domestic merchants) have sailed through. After my 5th separate attempt at booking a foreign rental car failed last weekend, I finally called the bank in frustration. To my surprise, they were able to manually lift specific restrictions that they claimed were from “Verified by Visa”, so that I could use the card for the purchase after all, which is a handy thing to know.

A declined purchase that triggers a fraud alert is usually easy to resolve

Anyone who has used credit cards extensively has run into declined purchases, particularly when making foreign purchases. It isn’t uncommon for issuers to flag foreign transactions as there is probably a higher rate of fraud with regard to foreign purchases. Some issuers are more sensitive than others in this regard; I’ve rarely ever had a foreign transaction declined on one of my Chase or Amex cards, but it happens more predictably with Capital One and US Bank.

A lot of the time, when a purchase is blocked, you’ll get a text message or email from the issuer asking to verify that you made the transaction. Usually, it is necessary to respond to that in order to unlock the card for further purchases. In other words, in my experience, when that fraud alert happens, it usually locks the card for all purchases until you respond indicating whether or not you recognize the transaction. Once you verify that you made the transaction, you can usually re-attempt it without issue.

I’m used to all of the above happening from time to time and I’m as familiar as most with that process.

However, last week I rent into a slightly different situation with US Bank.

US Bank was blocking all of my Rentalcars.com and other foreign rental car transactions

I’ve been making a bunch of travel plans lately and I booked rental cars in 4 different countries last week via Rentalcars.com (as a side note, I had a Capital One Shopping offer for 30% back. They all tracked at about 35.7% back. I don’t understand why, but I’m not complaining).

All 4 times, I tried to use my Altitude Reserve card. I did that primarily because I was curious if it would trigger Real-Time Mobile Rewards so that I could use my Altitude Reserve points at a value of 1.5c per point to erase those charges. Note that Real-Time Mobile Rewards typically requires a US-based charge, but I thought maybe it would work since I was paying Rentalcars.com rather than the local rental outfits. That has worked for me in the past with prepaid Autoslash.com rentals where I paid Autoslash (for instance, I rented from a local company in Mauritius last year, but I reserved and paid through Autoslash and I got the Real-time mobile rewards text triggered by the Autoslash.com charge). Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a Rentalcars.com transaction to go through with the Altitude Reserve. Each time, I eventually gave up and used a Chase card (which worked without issue).

Then, on Saturday, I tried a rental car at Sicily by Car (a local Italian rental company). The transaction was once again declined on my Altitude Reserve card (a side note here: Sicily by Car offered Dynamic Currency Conversion so that I could pay in US Dollars — for a fee of 3.9% and a poor conversion rate….no thanks! I wanted to pay in Euros).

A painless “double bypass” did the trick

After my Sicily by Car transaction was declined without any fraud alert present (same as with the Rentalcars.com purchases), I called US Bank. I was mildly annoyed since the US Bank Altitude Reserve, which is not currently available for new applicants, is a travel rewards credit card that carries Primary Rental Car Collision Damage Waiver (CDW) and the card has a $400 annual fee. I felt like I shouldn’t be having so much trouble using it to pay for travel (in this case, to rent a car) overseas.

Again, I didn’t have a fraud block on the card. I’ve used it in between rental car attempts to pay for other things without issue, including a couple of overseas hotels that required large deposits. Because of this, I thought that calling the bank was probably going to be a waste of time. Since there was no fraud alert and I couldn’t see any charge attempts on the card, I expected a phone agent would tell me that they didn’t see any charge attempts and that they would subsequently point the finger at the merchant. I’ve been in enough of those situations where each side points the finger at the other that I figured the call would be a waste of time. I was on a deadline to pay for the car (that’s a separate story about how Sicily by Car takes the booking and you can’t pay for it until they confirm it). Nonetheless, for the sake of science, I called US Bank.

The first agent quickly transferred me to someone in the security team.

To my surprise, that agent could see all of the declined transactions (none of them showed up in my credit card login, but she could see them in the back end system, including merchants, dates, and amounts). I was glad that she could see all that!

I don’t really believe this, but the agent told me that US Bank blocks Rentalcars.com “because it’s a foreign company and there are too many instances of fraud”. Again, I don’t necessarily believe this, but that was her claim.

When I pushed back and said that this is a premium travel card and she’s essentially saying that I need to use a card from another bank for Rentalcars.com, she said that she could do something on her end to make it go through if I really wanted (um, yes!). Rather than go back and cancel and rebook the Rentalcars.com transactions, I was actively trying to pay for the Sicily by Car rental, so I asked for help with that.

The agent went on to claim that the issue on foreign rental car sites is that it requires “3D by Visa” verification and that’s why it wasn’t going through. That is indeed the name for Verified by Visa’s latest fraud prevention system. However, it’s dubious as to whether specific merchants or the entirety of foreign purchases are subjected to additional scrutiny (for what it’s worth, I didn’t need any verification at all to use a Chase Ritz card at Rentalcars.com and I wasn’t getting any request for verification from my US Bank card for either Rentalcars.com or Sicily by Car, the transactions just kept getting automatically declined). However, the phone agent said that she could do something to manually to bypass the extra Verified by Visa verification and she asked me to try Sicily by Car again.

She could see almost as quickly as I did that the transaction still got declined again (before I even told her that it got declined). However, it’s notable that the messaging was different this time — it showed up as a “warning” and specifically said to contact my bank (and the declined messaging used different wording than the previous declines). It seemed like perhaps the previous declines came from Visa and that whatever bypass the agent had done was telling the system not to use Verified by Visa but rather to pass the charge through directly to US Bank.

The agent said, “Well, I could open you up completely” and then said she did a “double bypass” to allow the transaction (and perhaps any transaction?) to go through. She advised me to try again. That did it — the Sicily by Car charge went through with whatever she called a “double bypass”. She said if I run into a similar situation again, I should call and they can manually bypass whatever filters caused the transaction to be declined. I probably won’t bother calling every time I want to rent from a foreign company over just using a card from another bank that offers similar rental car protections, but it was good to know that they could manually make it work when the transaction was getting blocked!

So, again, the moral of the story is that if you want to use the Altitude Reserve for an overseas rental or other purchase and it is getting declined, call the bank. An agent can manually loosen restrictions on your card. I imagine that may not be limited to US Bank. That’s annoying and inconvenient (and has been unnecessary in my experience with other issuers), but it’s good to know nonetheless.

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