@CompyPaq: All the pricings can be different for different industries/volume. Some merchants might see a trans fee, some might have a flat discount rate, etc. For a company as big as apple I would imagine they're paying as low as $0.04 per transaction or less than 0.08% per transaction. Either way you hack it it's going to be uber low compared to a ma and pa merchant because of the insane amount of volume.

And Verified by Visa is a misnomer: In my case (w/ Chase), it's "Verified by some guy in his apartment" (maybe) [ambrand.com] . The domain, securesuite.net / securesuite.co.uk have slighty better whois information now, but it's still suspicious as all hell.

@Laura Northrup: I love going to sleep at night knowing that I've done my part to shore up the financial industry's bottom line!

Afterall, what's $5,000?

Maybe. But I bet Fallows has used this feature hundreds of times and is too embarrassed to say "Yeah, I am rich and lazy. Sue me."

Apple licenses Amazon's 1-Click [CNET]

I recently had my HSBC debit card start getting declined everywhere. Turns out, there was a hold on it because of a $320 ATM transaction I'd made a few days earlier. In talking with HSBC about why my card wasn't working, they said their notes showed that they'd tried calling and left messages and sent emails and I hadn't responded. Because no one had called me or left a message or emailed me (they did have my correct number and email on file).

That's great that their fraud detection is picking up false positives, but they seem to be slacking on the "letting the customer know so he/she can confirm or deny that it's fraud" part.

I wish Itunes also triggered fraud alerts on my visa.

They stole $20 from me for a .99 cent app.

For anyone who wants to avoid this, you can purchase a gift card and attach it to your one click account on Amazon. That way the credit card only sees one (relatively) large purchase. On the plus side this also works to help keep a budget. That one-click is evil...

If you pay your credit card off in hundreds of $1 electronic bill pay installments, though, you're all set.

Someone might've very well have opened an Amazon account and used a stolen credit card to make tiny charges as a means of validating the credit card number.

Amazon might very well have their own internal controls designed to detect fraudulent activity, and Amazon might claim that they vet their sign-ups, and if a charge comes out of Amazon it means that it passed their anti-fraud check, but individual credit card issues are not obligated to just take Amazon's word for it.

@juri squared: Upon closer inspection, it looks like they did. He converted pdf's-$0.15/ea. The charges are for $0.45 and $0.30 on two separate days-looks like they bundled three together one day, then two the next.

It might also help if Visa made a note that Amazon/Kindle fees are in the "legit" category of micro-payments.

@juri squared: They do something like that for mp3 downloads-I've purchased three in short order and only saw one $2.67 charge (0.89x3)