Re: Interesting
"I would think it would be better to have overly active fraud detection than not enough"
In most cases, you're right, but overly active fraud detection can have some significant problems too. I've had online payment systems go totally haywire when the payment wasn't even declined yet; my card simply wanted additional verification of the charge, then approved once it got it. In the meantime, the payment system gave up on me and canceled the order, so I had paid them without completing my order. I ordered a second time which worked, and the situation got cleaned up without too much chaos, but that could cause problems for some groups of people, for example if the transaction was large, they didn't have a lot of cash on hand, and the payments were on a statement before one was removed. It's probably easier to err on the side of caution when I haven't had to experience the effects of frequently incorrect caution. If it was happening to me a lot, I too might want them to dial it down a bit.
I'm reminded of a piece of antivirus software that decided that the output of a certain compiler was malware. I couldn't run any code I compiled because every time I ran it, the file would either be quarantined when it was created or deleted when I tried to execute it. I screwed with the compiler to fix the antivirus's inaccurate judgement, but it probably would have been easy to convince me to remove the antivirus software when I had been fighting with it for a while (work computer, so for better or worse, I couldn't remove the antivirus).