In message Roland Perry
was claimed to have wrote:

In message , at 09:33:10 on
Wed, 27 May 2009, Graham Harrison
remarked:
In cases such as this what seems to happen is that someone offers cheap
tickets (as we all know, even easyJet tickets get expensive at times).
The passenger pays the intermediary and the intermediary pays the
airline using the fraudulent card.

I can understand why there is greater risk when the ticket is paid for
by a third party - but when the Credit Card is in the same name as the
passenger, why are Easyjet cancelling those tickets too?

My guess? It's more profitable to see who shows up at the airport then
attempt to bill them higher rates (and otherwise resell the seat) then
to attempt to contact people and identify whether a transaction is
fraudulent or not.

(Of course, we should also be asking where the false "card declined"
messages are coming from. I have experienced this several times
recently, but for flights/train-tickete at the time of ordering so I
simply used a different card; but one long-standing CC monthly charge
was falsely bumped[1], and a phone company cut me off!)

[1] Phone company says it was declined, Card Company say they were (a)
never asked and (b) have in any event never declined any transaction on
that card.

"Card Declined" is sometimes used as a catch-all for other errors, or
where the merchant account's fraud system detected something suspicious
and declined the transaction (although not the specific card) before
even talking to the issuing bank.

Unfortunately, it's not in a company's best interests to return the
exact error message received, doing so actually encourages fraudsters to
use said company's services to validate credit cards. For example, if I
have a credit card number, name, billing address, phone number and CVV2
but know that one piece of information is wrong, a merchant that will
tell me which piece if wrong is invaluable.