I recently stopped at a McDonalds in Fairfax, Virginia. On all the card swipe machines, there were notes that “We do not accept credit card from Union Bank of India”. Why might this be?
I can think of the following possibilities:
- Union Bank of India has been the target of a recent scam. I have been to other McDonalds in the region, and none of the others have this sign.
- Union Bank of India has blacklisted this restaurant for some reason.
- The owners or managers of this restaurant have a grudge against this bank.
The only way to get a factual answer to this is if the manager of that store is on this board, or if you ask the question at the store. I can only speculate that:
Charges on cards from that bank may have been frequently charged back. Because McDonald’s doesn’t collect a signature from customers, they cannot prove that they processed a charge from a card with a signature matching the signature on the receipt, which is normally a requirement from the major credit card associations. So if there’s a chargeback I’m assuming they eat the charge.
It could be that a few customers in that area are doing this to get free food.
I used to manage billing and payments for a large domain registrar and we had so many chargebacks on purchases with addresses in Indonesia we just stopped accepting anything from Indonesia. Situation was a little different because it had nothing to do with what banks issued the cards; they were stealing card numbers and using them online. This was before the advent of CID numbers, so when the cardholder discovered the fraudulent charge and charged it back, we had to eat it. No problem because we cancelled the domain name, but the credit card association fines you for this and if the chargeback rates are too high they threaten to cancel your merchant account.
The crooks didn’t really want to buy domain names. We were one of the earliest merchants to do real-time online authorizations and they were just trying to find out if the card was good as fast as possible.