Why does Visa want me to do this?

Two words: CREDIT UNION.

All this talk of fees for ATMs, for debit card purchases, for blowing your nose on your receipt, it’s all foreign to me. My credit union doesn’t charge a transaction fee or an ATM fee or any other of these horrid hidden fees that everyone’s complaining about. That’s one good thing about banking with a member-owned institution; we don’t screw ourselves with a bunch of pissant fees.

They do refuse to send back my cancelled checks every month though, and that pisses me off.

Word of advice from a fraud analyst. This will most likely not work. Pay at the pump transactions are monitored because fraud perpetrators like to test stolen cards there. One swipe and you know if the account has been closed or not. Activity like this usually results in security holds placed on the account preventing activity until the customer verifies it.

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I do it all the time. I was told about this by a phone bank employee, when I was 1000 miles from home and only had $11 in my check card account. He said as long as I used the pay-at-pump option, I should be able to “buy” tanks of gas for only $1, then deposit money in my account once I got home.

I still use this delay to get my gas today. I usually get my first tips of the week on Tuesdays, but I need gas on Monday. As long as I have at least $1 in my account, I can get my gas. Then Tuesday I deposit cash before the bank branch closes at 7pm.

I did get calls from my bank when I first started using my check card to buy gas. As a courier, I buy gas all over the place. So that may have been a red flag that my card had been stolen. I had also just returned from a trip to Maine, so I had gas purchases from there back down to Virginia.