Q: I am thinking of using a credit card protection company to handle our fraud controls. What could be the consequences?
Prejudice with no Pride
I think the best way of illustrating the problem is the following little case study. I suffered at the hands of racial prejudice today. Not the obvious kind but the pervasive institutional kind. I’ll tell the tale as quickly and succinctly as I can.
My elder son is in Japan. He takes size 12 shoes. You can’t get them in Hiroshima. I ordered them from a company called Walktall. My billing address is in London. They took my money for two pairs of shoes. Later, their credit card detectives said that because the order came from West Africa (Ghana) someone may have stolen my credit card. Customer Care said that this thief could be trying out the card to see if it worked and would then move on to bigger things. Hm two pairs of big shoes for someone in Japan. The mind boggles. I never realised that thieves took such surreal and longwinded routes to achieve their ends.
What is at stake here is something rather significant. Knowing the business world as I do, I am often confronted by businesses hiring companies to work as contractors. They bring in these specialists and hand over responsibility and accountability to them. It never occurs to the business owners that their entire customer relations are hinged upon the behaviour of these contractors. Thus it is, in this case, that the contractor’s credit checks include orders from Ghana, which to most WASPS means ‘err...somewhere in Africa’. There was no attempt to cross-check the contractor’s rescinding of the order by Walktall. In fact, the supervisor I talked to was as assertively blind to the whole question of cultural insensitivity as 19th Century missionaries wandering around the dark heart of the Congo to bring God to people who, they believed, had no souls.
“We are protecting our customers” she kept on averring, oblivious to the fact that this one disgruntled customer then becomes a catalyst for dozens more to walk away from the site at Walktall. She had no skill in placating me but preferred to accuse me, implicitly, of ignorance of credit safeguards and a nuisance.
So my son has got no shoes. Walktall is diminished to Walksmall and I am more aware of the incipient problems people from Africa face when they try to improve their countries’ economies.- via their dealings with the west.
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