"nobody" wrote in message
...
As far as merchants who are not honoring debit cards, I'm not sure how
smart
their systems are when they try running a card,

Large outfits, especially internet sites which capture your credit card
information can easily apply some logic to validate a vard either by
obtaining
list of BINs corresponding to debit cards, or perhaps even by having their
own
bank block debit card transactions right away.

I'm thinking it's likely the case -- large merchants have a system which
will identify the BIN and determine if it's a credit or a debit card. I
was going to post a bit in detail about it, but I see you posted about the
BINs in another post. The financial institution I work for uses different
BINs or "prefixes" (all starting with 4's) for Visa cards -- but it's a
different prefix for debts and different for credit. The BINs or "prefixes"
are unique to the financial institution, but the digits after that are
unique identifying your account.

As to the original poster, I strongly suspect a daily spending limit may
have come into place. If you tried putting the $4,500 all at once on a
debit card, it likely declined for that reason and may have also created an
alert with your issuing bank. Whether they'll follow-up on it or not (call
you and ask if you tried to make the purchase) is another story.

If I tried putting $4,500 at once on any of my debit cards, it would
decline... not because of lack of funds, but the daily spending limit. You
can also pay your credit card above and beyond to generate a "credit"
balance -- but whether the institution will generate a refund check
immediately or let it sit as a credit balance for awhile, I'm not sure.

Steve