Billing address not matching the address which the bank has on record

Question

This is related to the comment Is billing address required for debit card payments in the UK?

I have paid online countless times by indicating billing addresses which don't match the one on record at the bank whose card I was using; there were never any problems even with the most well-known and respectable firms.

I am now about to pay the UK Home Office via MOTO (writing down my debit card numbers and security code) with a card registered in the EU and I don't want to disclose my EU address: I would leave the Cardholder address field blank in the payment slip, or indicate my UK address which has nothing to do with my EU bank account (this is the address I indicated in the application form which this payment is related to). The comment linked above says that if I don't give the address, they will reject the payment and if I give an address that doesn't match the one the bank has for me, they will reject the payment and quite possibly flag my application as fraudulent. This harsh prediction doesn't match my experience; any thoughts?

Answer 1

This will depend entirely on the policies of the entity you are trying to pay and what sort of risks that vendor is trying to prevent. If you provide an incorrect address, the card network will inform the biller that there was a mismatch on the address. At that point, it would be up to the biller's fraud prevention system to decide based on all the information they have whether to allow the transaction to complete or whether to reject it. If you're dealing with a vendor that sells easily resold electronics, they are likely to have much stricter rules than a government office taking payments for property taxes. Lots of thieves would try to buy electronics with a stolen credit card. Not a lot of thieves would try to pay their property taxes with a stolen card.

It seems odd that you don't want to disclose your actual billing address to a government agency. Perhaps you have a perfectly legitimate and utterly non-controversial reason for this. But if Bad Guys would also have a reason to want to avoid giving out their actual billing address for whatever transaction you are trying to complete, there is a decent chance that the biller's fraud prevention system would reject it. Note that billers mark thousands of transactions as potentially fraudulent in their systems and never do anything else with them. So it is highly unlikely that having a payment rejected would lead to any sort of real negative consequences for you. Other than still needing to complete whatever transaction you want to complete.

Answer 2

I live in the US so YMMV, but I went through a many-months-long saga of having my credit card rejected by an arbitrary selection of vendors (consistent in terms of who was rejecting my card, but no common thread between them that I could discern).

The cause, discovered only after numerous calls to my bank, was that my address was stored in two places in their systems. In one instance, my ZIP (postal) code was stored as five digits, in the other, the 5+4 format.

The vendors who were rejecting my card, when they deigned to give me a reason, cited 'address mismatch.' Both entries had the same address, just ever-so-slightly different values in the ZIP field.

Relevant to your question: I learned that day that vendors have some flexibility in terms of what information they request for verification purposes and different vendors establish their security/risk preferences in different ways (this is why many vendors continued to accept my credit card: they weren't requiring an exact match on ZIP, satisfied with 'contains' instead).

My takeaway from that experience is that there is nothing explicitly and a priori structural about your end of the transaction that would guarantee a rejected payment - it will depend on whether or not the vendor requests that information and attempts to validate it. It's certainly not generally advisable to play chicken with financial systems, but one (at least) reason for your differing experience with payment systems from those expressed in that comment likely stems from these differences in practice.