Steam marked me as a "fraud" because I used my European Revolut card to try and make a purchase when I lived in Indonesia.
I get that they don't want European people to pay Indonesian prices through a VPN or whatnot, but I was living in Indonesia and living off a local salary; I thought marking me as a "fraud" was rather harsh; with the increased ease of international banking there are loads of cases where this is perfectly legit (Spotify also doesn't allow it, but is far less harsh in how they communicate it – Netflix posed no problems; it's also circumventable by using gift cards, which is how I used Spotify, but I never tried this for Steam).
Anyway, I'd wager a significant chunk of the "fraud" cases is stuff like this: circumvention of regional pricing.
I used to work for a company that does this sort of fraud detection. Using a credit card from a rich country in a developing country for an online transaction screams stolen credit card number. Fraudsters often use services like Steam where you can buy something fairly cheap to test the card number, then they go to the effort of trying a bigger transaction.
I'm on vacation in Croatia and my Spotify Premium expired. I tried to renew it with my Dutch card and was rejected, so I had to use a VPN set to Amsterdam...
I’m visiting Macedonia. I changed the email address on my Capital One account (migrating off Gmail) and they froze all 4 of my cards. To unfreeze them, I had to provide my drivers license, social security card, and proof of residence in the USA & then wait two weeks. There was no process for accelerating the timetable.
Did you notify Capital One you were in Macedonia at the time? Every time I’ve been abroad, I had to notify any card issuers first, just to make sure the charges weren’t flagged.
Otherwise, this level of fraud detection and response should be considered normal (and good).
I did not notify them, but they can clearly see I’ve been using the cards for the last two months. And I’ve called my card companies in the past to notify them of upcoming travel, and they all told me it was unnecessary with the new chips. If I had changed my email using my laptop & VPN connection to the USA, maybe I wouldn’t have had a problem, but I used the mobile app.
I didn’t mind the cards getting frozen. It could have been fraud for all they knew. What I did not appreciate was the fact that it took two weeks & multiple calls to my credit union to resolve proof of address. I was lucky that I had my social security and with me, and that I had a backup credit card from a different bank, otherwise it’s don’t k is what I would have done.
Capital One froze the cards. I don't think gmail has the ability to freeze someone's cards. Has nothing to do with gmail at all, just the change of email address in Capital One.
There's loads of services that are very anal about it. I also couldn't order a charger for my ThinkPad when I lived in New Zealand because the Lenovo website didn't accept my euro card, even though the shipping address was to New Zealand. I contacted support: nothing they could do. Had to use a friend's Kiwi account.
Stuff like this is why I just started keeping the accounts around as I move about instead of closing them.
The issue is that each country has its own Spotify pricing (eg. Croatia was half the price) and they don't let you select your country, they select it for you based on IP geolocation.
My Spotify's country was set to the Netherlands but after 2 weeks abroad it forced me to change my country to Croatia (maybe due to music copyright laws? No idea).
I think you figured it out. In general "fraud" gets used as an abstraction-primacy obfuscation term just like the more extreme "identity theft". The claim is obviously not akin to credit card fraud, and Valve doesn't describe the mechanics of what they're calling "fraud". So it's likely the one of the least offensive possibilities - like routing around their regional price discrimination. Which would make perfect sense as there's no identifying metadata tying a payment source to a location in the way that say a credit card does. Of course from the customer's perspective this is simply making the market more efficient, and I'll make sure to play my tiniest violin.
I get that they don't want European people to pay Indonesian prices through a VPN or whatnot, but I was living in Indonesia and living off a local salary; I thought marking me as a "fraud" was rather harsh; with the increased ease of international banking there are loads of cases where this is perfectly legit (Spotify also doesn't allow it, but is far less harsh in how they communicate it – Netflix posed no problems; it's also circumventable by using gift cards, which is how I used Spotify, but I never tried this for Steam).
Anyway, I'd wager a significant chunk of the "fraud" cases is stuff like this: circumvention of regional pricing.