Urgent advice re BA sale [and MFU-ing]
 

I want to travel with a friend to JFK and both of use MFU. However, as my friend does not have the money in his account at the moment, we logged in to his BA account, chose the pay cash and MFU section, got his seat on offer and when it asked if the person paying was travelling we said no, but when it went to the payment page it had automatically filled in his name and would not allow me to enter mine to match my credit card payment. So we seem to be stuck? Any ideas? I want to then make my booking seperately which would be fine but am now concerned that seat availability is tight as not many seats left on the flights we want. If we are in his ba account and just try to buy seats without MFU it lets me enter my name on the credit card payment section. HELP!!

That's normal...

Did you actually try going through with the payment? Should go through fine.

And IIRC, the reason is the rule that the person whose miles are being used must be the person who pays the cash element.

Absolutely correct...t and c's state that any miles res must be paid for using card of executive club member.

Nevertheless you can put any credit card details in there and it will go through fine, I've done it before with my card on someone else's BAEC account when they wanted to fly their sister over from the US urgently and he couldn't find his debit card.

Yes this is correct, however it is against the agreed t and c's and should not be encouraged as there could be unwanted consequences.

Isn't that likely to depend on the depth of the checks made when the card payment is being authorised? Saying it "will" go through fine might set someone up for disappointment if the card authorisation is then refused because the card holder's name doesn't match the credit card number.

UK-based merchants can't check the cardholder's name when they authorize a payment, due to data protection rules. Crazy but true!

So does that mean that when an online retailer asks for the cardholder's name to be entered on a credit card authorisation form exactly as it appears on the card, I'm actually wasting my time typing in anything more than one random letter?

I know the way that the billing address is usually checked, so I know it doesn't have to be an absolute 100% match. But I never suspected that they'd just ignore the name.

You would probably need to put in at least one letter as first and two letters as last name to make the form pass validation by the website, and I wouldn't risk it if there's any chance the card will be physically checked at some point (e.g. travel tickets).

For the benefit of others, the parts of the billing address that are checked in the UK are the numbers in the first line of the address and the numbers in the postcode.

And for those of us not common enough to have a number in the first part then any letters wiil do :D:D

So, to return to the OP's situation.

Supposing the person who would like to pay is called JOHN BROWN, and his friend (whose BAEC account is being used to provide the miles for the MFU) is FREDERICK WHITE. The BA webform fills in the cardholder name as FREDERICK WHITE and refuses to allow this to be changed. If Mr Brown puts in his credit card number and address, would BA send those details together with Mr White's name for authorisation?

And shouldn't this, therefore, be rejected?

BA will send the card number, expiry date, security code, and the digits from the first line of the address and the postcode for authorisation. It may or may not send other things as well, but only those details are checked. It will get back two separate responses, one to confirm the transaction has been authorised (i.e. the cardholder has money available) and a second confirming the address and postcode matched (assuming they did). The card scheme rules allow BA to proceed with the transaction even if the address and postcode do not match, but such a response is considered to put the merchant on notice that the transaction is higher-risk. When that happens, BA may choose to reject the transaction (or may perhaps flag the booking to require the card to be seen at check-in).

Incidentally, there are add-ins available for Firefox (and probably other browsers) which will enable disabled form fields on webforms.

Ditto ;)

In addition, my Amazon account always refers to me as MR. since that was the first part of the text on my account's nominated credit card :D

Wow.

And there I was, naively thinking that the purchaser's knowledge of the correct cardholder name associated with the card number would be an added layer of security.