Barclaycard Mistake Causes Olympic Ticket Gaffe

A mistake by Barclaycard saw more than 100 people who applied for tickets for the London Olympics have their purchases declined after the transactions were flagged as suspicious because they did not follow the normal pattern of spending for the customers.

The Olympic organisers, LOCOG, say they will try and take payment again, while Barclaycard has apologised and said it has adjusted its fraud detection.

A female applicant stated: “I ordered about £2,000 (US$2,880) worth of tickets.

“I got an automated call saying that a payment had been blocked for £700 ($1,008) from a London ticketing agency. I assumed immediately it was the Olympics.”

After calling Barclaycard she confirmed the purchase was for Olympic tickets, adding: “They’d blocked it because it was an unusually large payment, which I thought was rather odd considering that it should be expected that people would be buying Olympics tickets.”