Appreciating my new job

[jducoeur]

Oh, right: forgot to write up this one.

Sometimes, the universe decides to teach you something. In this case, it was that companies like my new one are at least to some degree in the business of helping people.

To wit: Memento is in the fraud-detection business. We deal with all sorts of fraud (generally financial), but the basic idea is the same -- trawl through the data, and figure out, as accurately as possible, what looks like someone doing something Bad.

I started at the job last Monday. *This* Monday, I got a call from my bank -- apparently someone stole my credit card number, and was going on a spending spree with it. Of course, they discovered this because of their automated fraud-detection systems, which noticed that this $6000 of charges on my card looked rather odd, and shut things down pre-emptively. This averts much hassle for me: while I'm still going to have to go to the nuisance of moving to a new card, the process has otherwise been pretty smooth so far -- they blocked the false charges, shut down the old card and sent me a new one without my needing to do more than have a fairly quick and friendly phone conversation with a surprisingly nice customer rep.

I honestly don't know whether the bank in question is one of our customers or if they're using somebody else's system. But it does drive home that the business isn't just about helping the big faceless corporate entities -- the better we do our job, the more tsurrus we can prevent for the people at the other end...

Comments

[ilaine-dcmrn.livejournal.com]

Very cool! It's nice to know you are doing some modest good in the world, just by doing your job.

[arthur-l.livejournal.com]

please include work on reducing false positives - I travel extensively, and am constantly getting holds put on my card for 'suspect' charges that to me look just like the hundreds of other charges I make every year. Each time the hold ends up causing me trouble because some important charge, and all subsequent charges, don't go through.

[jducoeur]

Oh, sure -- that's a very high priority. Many existing systems are pretty bad in terms of false positives, so we put a lot of effort into improving on that.

As a smallish company among giants, it's important for us to do better than them, and the financial firms care a *lot* about false positives -- they're not just a hassle for you, they're expensive for the bank. So it's in everyone's interest for us to improve on that...

[laurion]

Seems to be a wave of this happening lately, or at least, amongst people I know. I had to get a new card a few weeks ago myself, and I know of two others as well.

I must say, the fraud detection systems are very sophisticated, and I have had my bank call me up twice in the past 10 years for having things flagged. Both times the transactions were under $500, and both times it was just a single transaction.

[doubleplus.livejournal.com]

I agree; we've had two different cards get hit in the past couple of weeks. Both were cards we'd had long enough that we'd memorized the numbers (and since [Bad username or site: anthro_geek'/ @ livejournal.com] is somewhat dyslexic, that's saying a lot.)

[dervishspin.livejournal.com]

You used "tsurrus" in a sentence!!
*happy word geek sigh*

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

I thought it was "tsuris"? Going by Google-hits, "tsurrus" and "tsurris" are both much less frequently used.

[ladymacgregor.livejournal.com]

Yes! Some time ago, I called up *Bigbank* to complain about a random very small charge on my credit card - someone was booking $14 charges. We got that taken care of, by - as you say - a very nice customer rep, who somewhere along the way asked where I worked.

"I work for the company who made the software you're using right now," I replied (taking a guess, it must be admitted).

"Really? What company?"

"Pegasystems."

"Pegasystems! Yeah! That IS the software I'm using!"

It is FUN when that amorphous thing that you work on every day from 9 to 5 (all right, from 10 to 7) actually ends up benefiting you.