I was wondering how other insitutations were handling blocking of international countries other than OFAC blocked countries.

We've experience alot of fraud, but have been debating whether to block entire countries for fear of not complying with Visa rules.

As I like to say... and others may not echo my sentiment but... FORGET Visa... your obligation is to you and your customers. If you have fraud being perpetrated by a particular country feel free to block it.

I actually do think somewhere there are provisions within the Visa agreement (which by the way is violated by everyone from banks to merchants and 99.99% of the time Visa doesn't care)... which allows you to protect your institution. I think there may even be instructions for how long you can block a country and how you let Visa know you blocked it.

I will argue that no matter what Visa says, your examiners will tell you that your institutions operational, financial, and reputation risks should always outweigh those of a third party service provider.

Cheers!

Our EFT processor offers a product called TABS. We have a list of countries that we block in addition to the OFAC countries. These additional countries originate a lot of fraud and are not the usual tourist vacation spots. Sometimes we block additional countries permanently, and sometimes for 30 to 60 days at a time to see if the fraudsters will quit and move on to someone else. Occasionally we get a military person that will be in one of these blocked countries, so we write a special rule for this customer's card number to it is NOT blocked. The product works very well. We can even block certain MCC codes, though we have never done that. I agree with the previous commenter, in that I think protecting the customer, the bank's reputation, limiting fraud loss comes ahead of any VISA Operating Regulations. However, I think VISA would support any and all efforts that were done in good faith to prevent fraud and reduce losses. Best of luck with your efforts.

We have countries blocked that are considered higher risk, or that we have a history of fraud with.