BillGuard now uses your location to help combat credit card fraud

BillGuard touts itself as the world’s first people-powered antivirus system for bills, with predictive algorithms that alert you when there’s unexpected charges made on your bank cards such as hidden fees, billing errors, scams and fraud.

Four months after it finally launched out of North America, landing in the UK, Australia and New Zealand, BillGuard has announced an interesting new feature is coming to its Android and iOS apps.

BillGuard will now tap your phone’s location to help protect against fraud, sending alerts when your card is swiped in a location it doesn’t recognize.

When you opt-in to share your location, BillGuard begins tracking your phone’s location and attempts to match where you’ve visited with where your card has been used. When a match isn’t made, you receive an alert. If it picks up a transaction from a location it knows you weren’t at on a particular day, it will tell you so.

This is striving to combat crooks who use copies of stolen credit cards in the same geographic area as the cardholder, a simple technique that’s often used by miscreants as it’s less likely to trigger bank alerts on suspicious transactions.

BillGuard also claims to be smart enough to distinguish legitimate ‘card-not-present’ transactions, such as online and telephone. So hopefully you won’t be receiving alerts every time you order a pizza delivery.

As with the existing version, you can dispute any awry charges in-app directly with the merchant. But now, you can also keep tabs on your spending via a built-in transaction map.

Card Location Alerts is hitting public beta on Android and iOS today. Unfortunately, the new feature is only available in the US for now, but it will be rolled out internationally at a later date.

Read next – BillGuard launches for iPhone to combat the ‘$14bn’ lost to credit card fraud

➤ BillGuard: Google Play | App Store