Originally Posted by
hogo74
I'm experiencing some frustration when trying to pay the processing fee for my Kenya Evisa using the required eCitizen platform. Each time I try paying with a US-issued Visa or Mastercard (Citi, Chase, and CapitalOne),the payment fails with a message to please use a card that has 3D Secure enabled. I contacted the payment processor help desk, and they responded that I should talk to my bank(s) to have that feature added/enabled.
I talked to these banks, they don't see the payment attempts, so that's consistent with the charge failing not because it's declined by the banks due to possible fraud, but rather because of the "3D Secure" requirement on the merchant side. The Chase fraud department representative I talked to said that they don't use 3D Secure and cannot add it to the card and that they, like other banks in the US, instead use Verified by Visa.
Verified by Visa is just the Visa branding for their 3D-Secure service, so those two things are not anything different.
Unfortunately most US issuers are simply not adopting the global standards which are becoming mandatory in much of the rest of the world and this problem is going to become widespread when trying to use US issued cards abroad in the future. Many big processors in Africa simply blacklist many US issuers because of this, especially in the travel sector where chargebacks can be significantly higher than average. Barclays is a notable exception and their cards are 3DS activated as a default.