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Verified by who??! A letter to VISA.

Dear Visa,

Over the last few days I’ve spent many frustrating hours trying to book an AirAsia ticket over an hsdpa connection from a sandy tropical island. Not fun. Once the lethargic AirAsia site actually allowed me to book a ticket, the payment process was interrupted by something called “Verified by Visa” - a mysterious page at “securesite.com” that demanded that I register for the service, re-entering all of my contact info, showing my credit card details, etc. I have a few problems with this:

1. The service died halfway through my “registration” leaving me at a blank screen with nowhere to go. No idea if the transaction went through and whether I had seats booked or not. I ended phoning from the mainland to find out.
2. SecureSite.com?? I don’t know securesite.com from a hole in the ground. From my standpoint, all I’ve done is given yet another third party site all of my credit card details. Oh - I should trust it because there are Visa jpgs all over the place? Perhaps not.
3. I can just imagine the dismal marketing meeting the resulted in the decision to use “securesite.com.”
4. There’s no way to opt out of securesite.com or the Verified by Visa program that I could see.

So, in a nutshell, Visa’s program to make me feel safe (a) killed my transaction, (b) did so in a way that required phone calls to fix, and (c) made me feel less secure by dumping all of my info to yet another site that I don’t trust. Dear Visa: Please shut down the program until its ready for public use.

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