Banks and credit card fraud control: too much ?

Like most of you, I use credit cards. I travel with them and use them on the internet frequently. On many occasions transactions have been denied, so now I am in the habit of calling the banks in advance to inform them of my purchases and my travel arrangements.

Does anyone feel the banks are going overboard on fraud control ? I know it is a serious problem but this is a pain in the ass.

and make sure that the card company knows my departure and return dates and the countries that I will be visiting...I imagine I am more of a pain to them than they are to me. But the benefit has been that charges are rarely if ever denied and one more than one occasion I have been contacted after leaving a particular country to be notified of an attempted charge...has saved me a TON of hassle...

sP

Zero balance. I treated our hosts to dinner at a nice restaurant on the fourth night of our trip...but my card was declined. Horribly embarrassing, to say the least. The reason they gave me when I called customer service: The charge was thousands of miles from my home zip code, so they put a hold on my account. What was worse, they wouldn't even release the hold even though I was speaking to them on the phone and had given my passcodes and personal information. It is abso-fucking-lutely absurd. But of course, be one day late and they'll charge you $30.

.

All of my card companies and my bank put a fraud hold on my cards, so I couldn't use them. Luckily I had cash so I could eat, and my hotel was already paid for.

However...I needed to call the card companies to get them to release the hold. But, I couldn't make any kind of call without using a credit card. I tried the collect numbers on the back of the card, but the companies wouldn't accept a call from Europe. The Catch-22 mess was unbelievable. I started crying in frustration at one point. I eventually gave up and had to sort it out when I got back to the U.S. Luckily I had enough cash on me before that happened that I was able to survive a few days without the cards. I honestly don't know what I would have done if I had had to stay there another week or two. My husband might have had to wire me money or something. I was SO mad about the whole thing!

it's a real catch-22.