

Ask HN: Why credit cards despise sub $1 transactions? - GigabyteCoin

I signed up for a Google API paid account about a year ago. I use their API search console to determine how prevalent an IP registering to my service is. If there are too many results, they don&#x27;t get the freebie and are told why. If there are few results, they get the freebie and never know they were checked.<p>So my services isn&#x27;t all that popular apparently, and I only manage to rack up $0.05 to $0.25 in API charges per month.<p>Google for some reason decides to charge me in those amounts, every month. (Here&#x27;s another question, doesn&#x27;t google make $0.00 on a transaction below the minimum credit card fee?)<p>And every month, my credit card goes inactive, I get a phone call from security asking me if I &quot;know anything about this Google charge?&quot;. I say yes. They re-instate my card. I hang up the phone. Sure enough, the entire process repeats itself the next month.<p>I am with PC Financial Mastercard in Canada, if that makes any difference?
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pathy
I believe credit card fraudsters often test the cards with small charges in
order to determine if the cards actually work before going on a spending
spree.

Such small transactions are quite suspicious from the point of view of the
credit card company.

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ricardobeat
The deactivation is probably due to the recurrence of the <$1 charges, not the
value itself. Sub-$1 transactions are very common for verification purposes,
IIRC PayPal uses a random amount in cents to verify you.

