I suspect you're completely right, and in the unlikely event they even admit having blocked it, they still won't say why.

I suppose the argument would be that they cannot reveal details of how they flag potentially fraudulent transactions, as that would help criminals bypass it.

Sometimes it's easy to work out why they imposed a block - for example on the odd occasion I've really hammered the card in the course of minutes - nothing sinister, just a concerted effort at paying all the household bills at one sitting. But I'm always a bit surprised they can't recognize the recipient and amount of routine household bills as within expectations.

Other times, it's when I've placed an international order with a company not previously used.

But routine payment of my ISP doesn't seem to fit any of these categories. It was the exact same date as every month, the same payee as every month, and the same amount, within a few pence. It's not a fixed amount, as it obviously depends how much I use the phone, but as a typical month is "hardly at all", or "local calls only", there aren't massive variations in how much is due. Not an exceptional month for phone calls, by any means. Maybe even fewer than usual. Certainly no cause for anyone (or any system) to flag it as odd, and question whether it was legitimate.

If my phone bill went up tenfold one month, I could understand that being flagged as suspicious. I admit myself it would be unlikely, unless I suddenly had a new love interest in Australia! But it's difficult to see what could be odd about about a normal monthly payment. It wasn't even among a cluster of payments that could be construed as anomalous, so it's not frequency monitoring.

seems a bit of an overreaction?

check your online statement, most card providers now have a pending payments section, you can see if anything is pending, also make the payment to get the service unsuspended. If it turns out you paid twice then you chase up both card provider and plusnet to get it refunded.

Mine doesn't show pending (at least, it never has, that I've noticed, and certainly doesn't right now).

Slightly oddly, it doesn't show ANY recent transactions, either. I would have thought a train ticket purchased yesterday with no problems should be showing by now. Other than that (and the missing PN payment) I haven't used the card in the last few days. Payments tend not to appear until the next day, so I would not expect the PN one to show yet, even if it had been successful. The train fare should, though.

They haven't got back to me yet about whether they declined the payment - or even ever received the request. I didn't really want to use the call centre, so I used the secure messaging facility. Slower, but easier, and I'll get a record of what I said and what the answer was, too.

If they say: "Haven't a clue - we haven't turned anything down", it would point to it being PN's problem, but don't suppose I'll ever get to the bottom of it, really.

Some traders automatically try again, after a single failed attempt - PN don't it seems.

Come to think of it, I have had a problem in a shop, recently, where I had to retry several times.

The assistant said: "Don't worry, it isn't you or your card - sometimes it just does this!", but I did think it was a bit strange. Three goes is excessive, but I didn't really think anything of it at the time. Just blamed a dodgy network connection (the shop's, not mine).

It's only writing about it now that I'm reminded of that incident. But I've used the card successfully since, so it's definitely not every time.

Use the Plusnet chat rather than ringing them. You may have to wait but I found it less tedious than using the phone. One reason for failure can be the card expiry date.

Thanks for the tip. Have left it a bit late now, but will give it a go tomorrow. Have never tried the chat, and didn't know it existed.

The card expiry is not 'til 2018, so pretty sure it can't be that. I understand if it was imminent, it might be flagged up as "borderline", but two years still to run can't be the problem.

Edit: gave them a try, as they were still online (thought they quit at nine, but it's ten).

They have absolutely no info about why it failed - they said they weren't provided any.

Edited by TLM (Thu 14-Apr-16 22:04:13)

My sympathy to TLM as I think it is rather heavy handed, but it is probably a computer following a set route rather than a person. If my internet was suddenly stopped then I would be a tad het up. As she can access this forum, I am a little surprised that she can not get to the plusnet system. (see edit)

It does worry me though that increasing the answer to a problem requires access to the internet. This includes may things built into windows including trouble shooters as to why the internet might not be working.

edit: I read in a more recent post that it was temporary till she had clicked something to acknowledge her knowledge or the problem.

Edited by philippercival (Fri 15-Apr-16 00:20:39)

In reply to a post by philippercival:

My sympathy to TLM as I think it is rather heavy handed, but it is probably a computer following a set route rather than a person.

A person set the route.

I'm not certain but I think from what TLM said earlier that it only stopped access until the prompt saying payment had failed had been accepted - presumably they want to make sure someone has actually seen the prompt. I got the impression that the Internet and forums started working again after that - but TLM may correct me if I misunderstood that.

Well, two separate "interventions" to service - one ongoing, the other not.

They prevented me from accessing the community forums from my account, by making it redirect to the "payment failed" notification, every time I tried to go there. This is still like it, although I have since found I can circumvent it by just not logging in at all, and navigating there a different way - i.e. pretending NOT to be a customer, in effect.

But if I'm trying to go to the forums from my account, they've made it so the link won't work. This continues to be the case.

The "one off" interruption was that they disabled my browsing (completely) until I ticked an "acknowledge" box about the payment. Don't acknowledge - no more internet.

So in total, within 12 hours of the payment failing, I was emailed twice, had access to the PN forums restricted, and had my browsing temporarily suspended to force acknowledgement of a third reminder (after the two emails).

This all seemed quite belligerent, within hours of a single missed payment of a small sum. And especially when there's no evidence the customer is trying to evade payment, or has even forgotten to pay! I'm sure it's either a technical glitch, or misdirected fraud detection (still a technical glitch, I suppose), which has incorrectly designated the transaction as suspicious for some reason.

I would have though the software would be sophisticated enough to see that a payment of about the same amount, made every month, to the same people, was very unlikely to be fraudulent, and was obviously a monthly bill. They must know by now the people I pay regularly, so I should have thought all of those should be whitelisted, unless the size of the transaction differs markedly from the norm - which this one didn't.

I see from your first post that at least 36 hours has passed. By now I would be unable to resist the temptation to pick up the phone and talk to the bank and ISP to establish what did happen, why and how to stop it happening again. Maybe you have. Speaker phones are my friend here when Talking or rather trying to with a slow service like PN Customer service, you initiate the call, then just leave it beside you while you get on with something else.