All I can think is that the Credit Card companies are finally utilising their information systems to close down the gaps that merchants have used.
I wrote some major EFT-POS and point-of-sale authorisation systems for about a dozen years and from the early 1990s every credit card merchant and every credit card transaction carried identifying data over and above the finanical information.
In establishing links with both mastercard and visa, for authorisations of all sorts of cards, I was amazed at the quality of their data-mining operation as well.
Beleive me when I say that their data profiling was second-to-none when it came to estabishing cardholder and merchant behaviour, and they could easily tell if a merchant was mis-categorised based on usage patterns and values.
It was only a matter of time before the credit card companies implemented stricter controls to come into compliance with UIGEA, as VISAs corporate base is in San Francisco, while Mastercard are in St Louis.
It was just a question of “when” the Credit Card companies would comply – they have little choice as United States based corporates.
Given the recent high profile issue with the Canadian one-man processor, who was able to process a lot of transactions simply by (ahem) not quite declaring the accurate description of his merchants … I expected a lot of fallout for Banks and card companies over potentially embarrassing revelations.
I may be joining dots together where there are no direct lines, but I’m not surprised to see stricter standards being enforced as a result.