What is a good way to keep track of your credit card transactions, to reduce likelihood of fraud?
The best way is to retain the charge slips. After you are done for the month you can discard them.   Alternatively if you are using any of the personal finance tool or a simple XLS to track exepnses, it would be easy to figure out what you actually spent and what was not yours. Sign up for alerts.  Everytime you use your card, you'll get an alert.  That way if there is an unauthorized transaction, you'll know right away. The alerts can also tell you what amount was charged - since this happens right away, the last last cc transaction is fresh in your memory and any overcharges can be easily detected. Has saved me more times than I can remember! "There are some tools that might help you. For example, I have an ""Expense It"" application on my iPhone, where I can type in a purchase while still at the cashier, the idea is to track expenses on a trip, but the implementation will suit your needs perfectly. Keeping slips is a way to go too, but I personally don't like that because I'm a messy person and after a couple of days all the receipts are gone. If you can keep track of tons of slips - you can just do that." "One trick is to make all purchases end in a particular number of your choosing, say ""3"". From now on, all restaurant meals,gas purchases, and anything in your control, end them in 3. When you glance at the bill, you can skip these charges, and look carefully at the rest. It's not 100%, as you couldn't easily impact supermarket charges and many others, but it's half of my routine charges." Read your bill, question things that don't look familiar. People who steal credit card numbers don't bother to conceal themselves well. So if you live in Florida, and all of the sudden charges appear in Idaho, you should investigate. Keeping charge slips seems counter-productive to me. I already know that I bought gasoline from the station down the street, a slip of paper whose date may or may not align with the credit card bill is not very useful. The half-life for a stolen card is hours. So you tend to see a bunch of charges appearing quickly. If someone is stealing $20 a week from you over an extended period of time, the theif is probably someone you live or work with, and paper slips won't help you there either.
Michael Pryor's answer is accurate to the actual question asked. The current accepted answer from Dheer is not entirely true but roughly provides an overview of the different entities involved in a typical transaction, with some wrong terminologies, corrected and improved below.  The issuing bank, the one that issues the credit card to the customer. When it comes to the service fee split, the issuer bank takes on the majority of the cut in the service fee paid by the merchant to the different entities. For example, on a 2.5% overall fee paid by merchant, roughly 1.5% goes to the issuer, 0.3% goes to the card network (visa, master card, etc) and the remaining 0.7% goes to the acquiring bank. Reward programs have a partnership with participating merchants, where merchants are charged a higher service fee, for the likelihood of driving a higher volume of transactions to the merchant. A portion of the rewards also comes from the issuer, who shares a percentage of their fee back to the customer, in exchange for the same likelihood of making more profit through increased volume in total transactions. For example, a reward program may charge merchants 4.5% fee, with 3.5% of it going to the issuer. Upto 3% of this can be given back to the customer for their loyalty in using the card service. The banks can afford to take as little as 0.5% instead of their regular 1.5% due to the increased volume of transactions and the fixed fee they collect as membership fee. Note that costco has a similar business plan, but they make money entirely of membership fee. So with enough clients, banks can theoretically afford to run their program entirely on membership fees, costing no additional service fee to merchants. The service fee depicted above is arbitrary, and it can be lowered if the merchant is also a client of the issuing bank, that is, both the issuing bank and acquiring bank are the same. So it is kind of a win-win-win situation. And as usual, the banks can afford to make a larger income, if the customer ends up paying interest for their credit - although the rewards program is not designed accounting on this. &gt;&gt; Hey! Do you mind giving your credit card to the waiter...  &gt; I'm not especially fond of that, but it's easy to report fraud to the bank and most of the time the bank will reverse the charges.  No kidding! Of course, even I give credit cards to waiters. What do I care? **As you said, you are not liable to any fraud on your credit card.** None at all!!!!  It's only Merchant, not the credit card company, that pay the price for fraud... **and you pay higher prices to cover for losses from fraud.**  &gt; The PIN situation is different because a mugging is life-threatening.  Nonsense! Mugging at the ATM is so rare, each ATM has a camera. **In any case, I am not talking about using PIN to withdraw money!** I am talking about PIN to authorize charges on a credit card or ATM card.  &gt;&gt; We already determined that nobody even care about signatures or check them.  &gt; You can't use a stolen card at an ATM with a signature.  Huh? You totally got it wrong what I said, or, you argue for the sake of argument.  **I am saying that cards that require you to enter a PIN cannot be used used when stolen or copied. Yes or no?**  **On the other hand, cards that require signature can be used when stolen or copied because signature is a worthless method to validate the charge. Yes or no?**  LASTLY, my Costco credit card has a picture of me on it. **Question for you, since for some reason you argue so much against PINs: Wouldn't a picture on the card better than a signature?** Yes or no?  Do you see? There are so many ways to make this system so much more secure and fraud proof... but, ON PURPOSE, the credit card companies don't want that... because they are not liable for fraud. Simple as that. POS stands for Point of Sale (like a specific store location) which indicates that the purchase occurred by using your debit card, but it can also be the on-line transaction done via 3-D Secure. Checking with bank, they said that Kirchstrasse transaction could be related to direct marketing subscription service ordered on-line. Investigating further what I've found these kind of transactions are performed by 2BuySafe company registered at Kirchstrasse in Liechtenstein with went through the MultiCards on-line cashier which can be used for paying different variety of services (e.g. in this case it was polish on-line storage service called Chomikuj). These kind of transactions can be tracked by checking the e-mail (e.g. in gmail by the following query: after:2014/09/02 before:2014/09/02 Order). Remember, that if you still don't recognise your transaction, you should call your bank. I have found also some other people concerns about that kind of transactions who ask: Is 2BuySafe.com and www.multicards.com some sort of Scam? Provided answer says: MultiCards Internet Billing is a provider of online credit card and   debit card processing and payment solutions to many retailers   worldwide. MultiCards was one of the pioneer companies offering this   type of service since 1995 and is a PCI / DSS certified Internet   Payment Service Provider (IPSP) providing service to hundreds of   retail websites worldwide  MultiCards is a registered Internet Payment   Service Provider and has implemented various fraud protection tools   including, but not limited to, MultiCards Fraud Score Tool and   'Verified by Visa' and 'MasterCard SecureCode' to protect card   holder's card details.  2BuySafe.com Is also Secured and Verified By   GeoTrust  The certificate should be trusted by all major web browsers   (all the correct intermediate certificates are installed). The certificate was issued by GeoTrust.  Entering Incorrect information can lead to a card being rejected as @   TOS  2BuySafe.com is hosted on the Multicards Server site Credit card limits are, for the most part, soft limits; sometimes, a credit card will allow you to charge a little over your limit. The large amount they allowed you to go over your limit is unusual, but not unheard of.  It is your responsibility to keep track of how much you charge on your credit card, not the bank. Just like with a checking account, you are supposed to keep track of everything you charge so that you always know how much you have spent and can pay it off.  Raising your limit will not help your problem; it would only make it worse. You have already charged more than you can afford, and they have already effectively raised your limit by $1200.  I realize that this situation is tough, but fortunately, you have a learning opportunity here. I recommend you resolve to stop using the credit card in this way, and work toward paying off your debt to zero. At that point, treat your credit card as if it was a debit card, and only charge what you already have in the bank to pay off right away. (Or, just use a debit card and get rid of the credit card.) Learning to do this now will save you lots of money in interest.  If you don't learn to do this, you will find yourself in even more debt in the future, and it will be even harder to dig yourself out.  If you need some more help on getting out of debt and learning to budget your money, I recommend the book The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey. I don't know of any and it is unlikely that you will be able to find one.  Most credit card processors charge a flat fee plus percentage.  The flat fee is typically in the 35 cent range making the cost of doing business, in the manner you are suggesting, astronomical.   Also what you are suggesting is contrary to best practices as hosting services, and many other industries, offer deep discounts when making a single payment for an extended period of time. This is not very helpful, but I think it is unrealistic to find what you are suggesting. Sap just developed a fraud detection module for their ERP suite in conjuction with EY. It offers live fraud scanning so you can stop a flagged transaction before a transfer is carried out.  I saw a presentation an it looks pretty powerfull although it is only in the early stages. I'm not sure if this is what your looking for but my favorite piece of work was credit card fraud and ways banks are preventing it.   Topics included:  -Family's at risk (who has the most risk?) -Credit card strip vs chip -Cost on chip scanners for local businesses -Apple Pay and the likelihood of getting hacked -Insurance and how it will cover a business with out chip readers -example of chipotle and target getting hacked -bitcoin and is it an easier source   I wrote a paper about 4 years ago, and it had multiple finance topics involved into it.   Hope this at least gives you a direction of what your looking for ! Websites like neobudget dot com or mint dot com can help you see where your money is going, especially if you use mostly checks, debit cards, or credit cards for your purchases.  They are less useful if you use cash often.