Our little business has a Transbank POS terminal, enabling customers to pay with debit and credit cards. Among the features it offered was a facility for receiving non-presencial payments. A purchaser could send us their cc info, and we could make the payment. Businesses like LatAM airlines did this routinely.
We hardly ever used this facility, preferring to charge face-to-face, but when we tried to use it recently, it didn’t work. Querying this with Transbank, they informed me that this facility had been completely suspended.
Given the increased lack of respect for the law seen here in recent years, and the fact that this payment method can be easily abused, I guess the amount of fraud forced them to terminate this service.
Once again, unchecked and widespread dishonesty is making life harder for those who do try to play by the rules. Way to go, Chile
The positive side is that the nature of such widespread fraud is [somewhat] acknowledged and addressed.
The downside is that using non-Chile bank cards and even CL-bank cards, online purchasing has become handicapped to the point that I won’t even try. It’s easier for me to order from a foreign site than within Chilito. It doesn’t take much wisdom to understand the adverse affect this has on commerce within the country.
Speaking of which, all my eBay and other foreign purchases in the last few months have arrived without having to pay aranceles. Some purchases up to about US$50 or so.
In many ways Chile has become a model of ill-conceived and poorly executed commercial practices. I tried to pre-pay my Movistar mobile modem for a few months so I wouldn’t have to make the monthly transfer. They wouldn’t have it. Most modern companies would welcome a little extra cash sitting in their coffers. But not here. Welcome to the Toy Country.
Yeah, but in this particular case, Transbank solved the problem in the same way Don Otto did when he caught his wife making love with the neighbor on his living room sofa.
(For those unfamiliar with this old chiste Don Otto resolved the problem by selling the sofa.)
