Sound Advice

We are extremely fortunate to have direct contact with a couple of people at our UK bank's fraud department and as we travel extensively, we keep them apprised of our movements over the forthcoming months so that they know it's us when we use our bank cards at the ATMs. It's not foolproof, but they make a huge effort to ensure we can get access to our cash when needed and we emailed them to let them know we were heading out to Sri Lanka on Friday.  Here's their reply:

Please don’t lose the card- a degree of protection available to all other customers has been deactivated and we wouldn’t post a replacement to Sri Lanka.

One of my Team Managers went to Sri Lanka for his honeymoon - when he returned I asked him if he was going to replace his card as he had been to such a high risk location - he laughed and said no - A week later he asked me to replace his card and refund some fraudulent transactions in Australia. The situation has improved since the end of the war but the Tamil Tigers relied on credit card fraud as an important source of income and targeted many Western Visitors.

You are probably a more experienced traveller than some of my customers and less susceptible to some of the scams, but we had 2 travellers in Thailand this weekend who were drugged and their cards taken. An ATM card from a European bank represents a tempting target to many criminals in poorer parts of the world and although the local population are overwhelmingly honest - it’s still a jungle out there!

If we decline your card an alert is generated and worked by my team 24/7 - sometimes they will be an hour behind but you can ring the number on the back of the card any time - the best time to ring is between 9pm - 8am UK time when it is quietest and the operator will speak directly to one of my staff.

The most common reason for cards to be declined (by a huge margin) is requesting more than STG£300 - so please calculate your withdrawal amount carefully because most foreign owned ATMs can’t say “try a lesser value”

Stay safe - I hope you are having the experience of a lifetime.

Not just sound advice but also great effort to make us aware of the problems we all face when travelling in some parts of the world. There's no doubt we've been lucky but we also exercise caution and common sense when on tour to new countries. However, that does not mean we can become complacent or take things for granted.