I had my card freezed today and tried to use it contactless on the bus and it still went through. Is it supposed to work even contactless when it’s freezed?
majority of TFL transactions are offline resulting in the payment being accepted initially and only becoming an issue the next working day when TFL tries to collect the payment.
If the transaction is ‘online’ it will then be declined along with all subsequent transactions (including contactless) until a successful ‘online’ transaction is made.
I wonder what happens when a transaction is received offline, but you also did freeze the card. In theory, it should be rejected really… I suspect this could be a little bit of an issue once Mondo are regulated.
1 Like
@billinghamj the same thing could happen with any other bank couldn’t it?
e.g. with another bank TFL checks the card is ok at 9am, the card is cancelled at 12pm due to fraud, then used at 2pm offline for a journey - TFL has no way to know there was a problem till they actually check with the bank the next day. It’s really a problem on the TFL end (not properly verifying cards in real time), not on the bank end.
In this day-and-age we should never be verifying card transactions offline - if you can’t verify with a 3rd party (the Bank) why go along with the transaction … totally silly in my opinion. We’ve got enough IoT devices that its proven its not a challenge to connect a system of devices to the internet.
Its not the banks fault - it’s the merchant who doesn’t check the card online but relies solely on the data on the card itself … Rookie decision on whoever decided that.
@kennygrant No other bank allows you to freeze your card as far as I’m aware. Most likely for this reason.
@anon78471478 There are many cases where it is only feasible to do offline transactions, like when you’re on a plane. Additionally, in the case where a merchant’s network connection has failed, I’d prefer it if I could still buy whatever I wanted.
The same would occur with card cancellation. Transactions could go through after cancellation of a card because TFL are not checking to see if it is valid. This is just a risk of offline transactions I think, not specific to Mondo, it’s just easier to test with Mondo because you can freeze/unfreeze your card quickly.