Why can't online transactions be completed outside of business hours?
Generally, unless you're doing a wire transfer, bank transactions are processed in batches overnight. So the credit card company won't be able to confirm your transfer until the next business day (it may take even longer for them to actually receive the money).
"&gt; But I explicitly mentioned the customer experience, which is completely different and no matter how much you want your industry experience to matter for that, it doesn't affect it.  You mentioned the customer experience randomly in some parts, then threw in Wikileaks in others. If we're talking about the customer experience, we need to drop the payment processors aspect, because the majority of the time, the consumer doesn't even know who processes their card payments let alone care, and again, PayPal is not even close to the only option. If this were 1998 and people were really wary of buying online, then it would be a bigger deal to be banned from PayPal. But it's not 1998, and a ton of people don't care, and there are all kinds of alternatives.  PayPal can deny service all it wants (and it does that on a regular basis) and that in no way means that a business can't accept cards. You're ""customer experience"" premise is flawed. I literally spend all day helping businesses set up credit card processing, and PayPal is a drop in the bucket.   &gt;Could you clarify for me how VISA/MasterCard managed to block a merchant, who presumably wasn't a direct customer (but instead a payment processor customer), but cannot block a card holder? (yes, this is an honest question)  Visa and Mastercard have relationships with banks and/or processors, who have relationships with merchants. Visa and MC's agreements with banks and processors stipulate that those banks and processors can't offer services to companies engaging in illegal activity. Wikileaks was (allegedly) engaging in illegal activity, and it's on that basis that Visa and MC denied service to WL.  Visa and Mastercard have almost nothing to do with cardholders. They don't issue credit cards to cardholders, they aren't the ones that do credit checks to determine creditworthiness, they aren't the ones helping you with your monthly statement or a dispute, etc. Cardholders aren't Visa and MC's clients. When a transaction is run, it's authenticated by the bank that issued the card, not by Visa or MC, and it's the bank, not Visa or MC, that would block transactions or freeze a cardholder account.   &gt;The WikiLeaks blockade was clearly political. What makes you say otherwise? And this is political.  So your argument is that anything political is the same as anything else political? Kind of a stretch..  Wikileaks was denied service by the card brands for allegedly engaging in illegal activity. PayPal is denying service of its own volition, which FYI, it does every day to legal businesses. As long as their reasons for doing so aren't discriminatory based on status in a protected class, they are (and should be) allowed to refuse service." "You need to talk to your bank.  If you're unable to contact your bank until Monday, then wait until Monday.  Don't fixate on the idea that the transaction may ""hard post"" on Monday.  If it happens, it happens, but it's not the end of the world. Even if the transaction posts, it's not the end of the world.  If the retailer is legit, they will refund your money, although it may take some time for things to get sorted out. Even if the transaction posts and the retailer is not legit, it's still not the end of the world.  Your bank may help you in trying to recover the funds.  That's why you need to talk to your bank. As you have realized, blindly calling the number in the email is not a good idea, because if it's fake, you're calling the scammers.  Instead, what you should do is try to contact your bank through known trusted channels.  That is, look on your bank's website.  Do they have a phone number listed for fraud reporting or related inquiries?  Is it the same number you see in the email?  If so, you can call it.  If it is not the same number, but the number on your bank's website is a 24-hour number, you can call them at that number and tell them the situation. Based on what you've described, my own guess would be that the retailer is legit, but that the unusual large transaction was flagged by your bank as potentially fraudulent, which is why you got the email.  The fact that you happened to get the email just after canceling the order could be a coincidence.  This is especially true if all this happened in a short time.  Information about these transactions can't be transmitted and analyzed instantaneously, nor can emails be sent instantaneously; there may have been a delay in sending the email so it only arrived after the cancellation. As far as your worries about how ""enfact"" got your info, it is likely a fraud-detection service used by your bank.  Doing a bit of googling reveals that it appears to be a legit service, but there have also been instances of phishing attacks using faked ""enfact"" emails.  However, from what I see, these worked by trying to get you to click on a link, not call a phone number.  Also, if a scammer is able to send you a scam email that includes your actual order details, that's not a phish, it's an outright hack.  In that case the bank and/or retailer (whichever was hacked) would certainly want to know about it and would likely fall all over themselves trying to refund your money to avoid negative PR." "To answer your question briefly: net income is affected by many things inside and outside of management control, and must be supplemented by other elements to gain a clear picture of a company's health. To answer your question in-depth, we must look at the history of financial reporting: Initially, accounting was primarily cash-based. That is, a business records a sale when a customer pays them cash, and records expenses when cash goes out the door. This was not a perfectly accurate system, as cashflow might be quite erratic even if sales are stable (collection times may differ, etc.). To combat problems with cash-based accounting, financial reporting moved to an accrual-based system. An accrual is the recording of an item before it has fully completed in a cash transaction. For example, when you ship goods to a customer and they owe you money, you record the revenue - then you record the future collection of cash as a balance sheet item, rather than an income statement item. Another example: if your landlord charges you rent on December 31st for the past year, then in each month leading up to December, you accrue the expense on the income statement, even though you haven't paid the landlord yet. Accrual-based accounting leaves room for accounting manipulation. Enron is a prime example; among other things, they were accruing revenue for sales that had not occurred. This 'accelerated' their income, by having it recorded years before cash was ever collectible. There are specific guidelines that restrict doing things like this, but management will still attempt to accelerate net income as much as possible under accounting guidelines. Public companies have their financial statements audited by unrelated accounting firms - theoretically, they exist to catch material misstatements in the financial statements. Finally, some items impacting profit do not show up in net income - they show up in ""Other Comprehensive Income"" (OCI). OCI is meant to show items that occurred in the year, but were outside of management control. For example, changes in the value of foreign subsidiaries, due to fluctuations in currency exchange rates. Or changes in the value of company pension plan, which are impacted by the stock market. However, while OCI is meant to pick up all non-management-caused items, it is a grey area and may not be 100% representative of this idea. So in theory, net income is meant to represent items within management control. However, given the grey area in accounting interpretation, net income may be 'accelerated', and it also may include some items that occurred by some 'random business fluke' outside of company control. Finally, consider that financial statements are prepared months after the last year-end. So a company may show great profit for 2015 when statements come out in March, but perhaps Jan-March results are terrible. In conclusion, net income is an attempt at giving what you want: an accurate representation of the health of a company in terms of what is under management control. However it may be inaccurate due to various factors, from malfeasance to incompetence.  That's why other financial measures exist - as another way to answer the same question about a company's health, to see if those answers agree. ex: Say net income is $10M this year, but was only $6M last year - great, it went up by $4M! But now assume that Accounts Receivable shows $7M owed to the company at Dec 31, when last year there was only $1M owed to the company. That might imply that there are problems collecting on that additional revenue (perhaps revenue was recorded prematurely, or perhaps they sold to customers who went bankrupt).  Unfortunately there is no single number that you can use to see the whole company - different metrics must be used in conjunction to get a clear picture." "Dude, I'm a small business owner. The fact of the matter is employee costs are a big expense. But the truth is, I think people that pay minimum wage are scum.   If you're so convinced that a livable wage would make it ""worse"", why don't you standardize a companies 10-k and show me that the cost of the product will raise equal to the wage increase? You can't, because it won't. The cost increase on margins is divided over every operating metric a company has, and therefore the price won't increase at a 1:1 ratio.   Further, the margins that are made by the companies employing the people making minimum wage are often from government assistance. So you're claiming it's cheaper for the populace to create false net revenues by directing tax dollars to support the very people that can't buy food because of a $7 an hour wage.   Then you have the countless people stuck in the welfare hole of losing their benefits if they get a slightly better job that just knocks them out of the specified ranges required to qualify. So you have people that want to work, but now can't make too much money or it will make their life worse, all because of the system that was created by a minimum wage that never matched inflation and cheap companies that rely on welfare systems to keep their employees happy a rough to keep living.   Companies that pay minimum wage are jokes." As a general premise: In most of the online transactions in case of dispute the benefit of doubt is given to the customer. IE if the customer refuses to pay and claims that its not his transaction, the card company reverses the charges and does not pay the merchant (or recovers if its already paid).   There are many types of online vendors who use a variety of methods to ensure that they are not at loss. Some of these are: It takes some time for folks to renegotiate contracts and adjust policies in the commercial realm.  It's never as easy as simply going to a different web page. The different buearus have slightly different ways of scoring people, different APIs to integrate with everyone's software, and take somewhat different things into account. That takes some time to change. "My recommendation is to shop around for a bank that handles wire transfers in a more sensible manner. Many wire transfers are set up so that you do not need to go physically into a branch. The wire transfer system I use has me initiate the transfer online, then call a dedicated number with a pin to authorise the transaction (24/7/365). I'm on the other side of the world from where the money ""is"" initially - no branch visit required." "The simplest answer to why you can't see it in your online statement is a design/business decision that was made, most probably originally to make online statements differ as little as possible from old fashioned monthly printed statements; the old printed statements never showed holds either. Some banks and card services actually do show these transactions online, but in my experience these are the rare exceptions - though with business/commercial accounts I saw this more, but it was still rare. This is also partly due to banks fearing lots of annoying phone calls from customers and problems with merchants, as people react to ""hey, renting that car didn't cost $500!"" and don't realize that the hold is often higher than the transaction amount and will be justified in a few days (or weeks...), etc - so please don't dispute the charges just yet. Behind the scenes, I've had bankers explain it to me thusly (the practice has bitten me before and it bothered me a lot, so I've talked to quite a few bankers about this): There are two kinds of holds: ""soft holds"" and ""hard holds"". In a soft hold, a merchant basically asks the bank, ""Hey, is there at least $75 in this account?"" The bank responds, and then has it's own individually set policy per account type as to how to treat that hold. Sometimes they reserve no money whatsoever - you are free to spend that money right out and rack up NSF fees to your heart's content. Yet some policies are to treat this identically to a hard hold and keep the money locked down until released. The hard hold is treated very much like an actual expenditure transaction, in that the money is locked and shown as no longer available to you. This varies by bank - some banks use an ""Account Balance"" and an ""Available Balance"", and some have done away with these dual terms and leave it up to you to determine what your balance is and what's ""available"" (or you have to call them). The key difference in the hard hold and a real expenditure is, technically, the money is still in your bank account; your bank has merely ""reserved"" it, earmarking it for a specific purchase (and gently promising the merchant they can have their money later), but the biggest difference is there is a time-limit. If a merchant does not process a completion to the transaction to claim the money, your bank will lift the hold after a period of time (I've seen 7-30 days as typical in the US, again varying by institution) returning your money to your balance that is available for purchasing and withdrawal. In every case, any vaguely decent banking institution allows you to call them, speak to some bank employee, and they can look up your account and inform you about the different sort of holds that are on your account that are not pending/completed purchase transactions. From a strictly cynical (perhaps rightly jaded) point of view, yes this is also used as a method to extort absurdly high fees especially from customers who keep a low balance in their account. I have had more than one bank charge NSF fees based on available balances that were due to holds made by gas pumps, for instance, even though my actual ""money in my account"" never went below $0 (the holds were for amounts larger than the actual transaction). And yes, the banks usually would waive those fees if you bothered to get someone on the phone or in person and made yourself a nuisance to the right person for long enough, but they made you work for it. But I digress.... The reality is that there are lots of back and forth and middle-men in transactions like this, and most banks try to hide as much of this from you the client as possible, partly because its a huge confusing hassle and its part of why you are paying a bank to handle this nonsense for you to start with.  And, as with all institutions, rules and policies become easily adjusted to maximize revenues, and if you don't keep sizable liquid minimum balances (100% of the time, all year long) they target you for fees.  To avoid this without having fat wads of extra cash in those accounts, is use an entirely disconnected credit card for reservations ONLY - especially when you are traveling and will be making rentals and booking hotels. Just tell them you wish to pay with a different card when you are done, and most merchants can do this without hassle. Since it's a credit card with monthly billing you can often end up with no balance, no waiting around for a month for payments to clear, and no bank fees! It isn't 100%, but now I never - if I can possibly avoid it - use my debit/bank card to ""reserve"" or ""rent"" anything, ever."