I tried to set up EasyPark app for my wife. When I entered her Visa Travel Money card as her payment method, it was rejected citing it was a "Fraud" by Adyen. I set up EasyPark on my phone a few years ago and used my Visa Travel Money card as my payment method with no issues. In fact, it's still OK for me now in my EasyPark account. This is the first time I heard about Adyen and the payment to EasyPark now goes through Adyen. Has anyone had any problems with Adyen? Please share your experience. Thanks.
I did a bit of digging and found that the error you encountered is due to the risk assessment Adyen does as part of its fraud detection and prevention solution.
The complication is that is not easy to tell what the risk rules are (and Adyen has no reason to publicise their rules, otherwise people wanting to commit fraud can figure out how to defeat these rules). The extra complication is that Adyen allows merchants to tweak risk rules to better suit their risk appetite, and there is no way for us outsiders to know whether EasyPark has done this (and if so, how recently they could have done this).
One possible explanation for the issue you are encountering is that the fraud score calculated for transactions on your existing EasyPark account using a known Visa prepaid card is not high enough to trigger the fraud detection/prevention controls, but when you try to set up a new EasyPark account with a Visa prepaid card not used at that merchant before, the fraud score is high enough to triggers the fraud detection/prevention controls. My suggestion would be to try a different card on your wife’s account to see whether that helps.
As an aside:
EasyPark are the merchant, but they need to bring in another company to do the payment processing (e.g. process payments from Mastercards and Visa cards, check whether a card added to an EasyPark account is valid). It appears that EasyPark were using Adyen to check the Visa travel money card you added to your wife’s EasyPark account.
Your Visa travel money card should be classified by Visa as a prepaid card. Prepaid cards have no bank account associated with them and usually can be acquired without having to satisfy KYC requirements, so they can be a riskier payment method for a merchant to accept when compared with a debit or credit card. Having said that, when I opened an EasyPark account and added a Visa prepaid gift card to it a couple of weeks ago, I had no issues.
Payments processed through the EasyPark app are card-not-present transactions, which means the merchant cannot physically see the card being used for the transaction, plus the merchant would only need limited information (e.g. card number, expiry date, CVN) to process payment. That increases the likelihood of EasyPark being exposed to fraudulent transactions, which increases EasyPark’s incentive to have some sort of fraud prevention and detection offered by their payment processor. One control would be to do a 3-D Secure check (which is the check you sometimes see when your card provider asks you at a merchant’s checkout to enter an OTP sent to you via text), but I have heard that some payment processors can charge merchants extra for each 3-D Secure check, plus not all debit/prepaid/credit cards support 3-D Secure (or have it set up), meaning that EasyPark could drive away some legitimate business. Adyen’s fraud prevention and detection framework are another control a merchant can use to check whether a card or transaction are potentially fraudulent, and the up-shots for EasyPark are that the framework can be used when adding a new card to an account, plus it does not incur the same costs you may see for a 3-D Secure check.