Use your plastic safely while travelling abroad

In a lot of ways, credit cards have made travelling abroad easier than ever. You don’t have to deal with traveller’s cheques or carry loads of cash to exchange. As long as you take care of a few important factors, your credit card can become an extremely beneficial tool for overseas travel.

Here are some precautions that you should take to ensure a safe trip overseas with your card.

Notify your bank before you travel abroad. If you fail to do that and start making out of country transactions, your bank may place a hold on the account. As long as the card company knows where you’re headed, it will allow international transactions to be processed. The bank may also call you or send an SMS to check if you are in the foreign country where the transaction has originated. If you do not respond, the bank may stop your card to protect you from fraud.

Carry a mix of cards to minimise your risk for a lost or stolen credit card.

Write down the local emergency contact numbers for each of the credit cards you intend to carry along. Most of the credit card companies provide a ‘card protection plan’ which is primarily a card insurance plan. In case your card is either stolen or lost, this plan assists you to immediately block/cancel the card to prevent misuse. It also provides fraud protection and lost credit card coverage. The limit varies from company to company. The plan may also extend travel assistance and emergency cash advances to ensure that you return home comfortably.

Don’t let the card out of your custody as far as possible when you are transacting to avoid ‘skimming’ incidents. ‘Card skimming’ is the illegal copying of information from the magnetic strip of a credit or ATM card. Once scammers have skimmed your card, they can create a fake or ‘cloned’ card with your details on it. You could ‘mask’ the CVV2 number at the back of the card to prevent people who are handling it from reading that number. Knowledge of card number and CVV2 is all that it takes to allow crooks to carry out e-commerce transactions without the card in hand.

“Smart cards” or “chip and PIN cards” are becoming increasingly common in Europe. These cards are designed with extra layers of security, such as microchips that can be programmed with user information and a four-digit personal identification number (PIN) that must be entered when making a purchase. It’s best to travel with a smart card if you are going to Europe.

Try and shop at dynamic currency conversion (DCC) merchants. DCC gives cardholders a choice of paying the bill in their local currency. What this basically means is that as an Indian cardholder you are paying in rupees for a product that the merchant has originally priced in US dollars.

The writer is CEO, ElectraCard Services