Irish Water bill online payment issue

rosenrot

I just tried to pay my Irish Water bill online, as the deadline is very close and I was on vacation out of the country for a few weeks, so it is only now I have some time to sit down and pay my bill and the following thing happened:

I logged into my Irish Water account and I clicked on "Pay Bill". I filled in the details for my AIB VISA Debit card and clicked "Continue" and it REDIRECTED me to some "Activate your Verified by VISA" page that required me to fill in all my debit card details again, hosted on a different domain (arcot.com as far as i remember). :O

As it didn't give me the option to skip that activation, I just closed the page and logged out of my Irish Water account.

So I am now wondering if anyone else has experienced such thing and if so, how the hell is it possible for Irish Water to redirect your payment session to a third party domain and force you to enter your card details under an unknown site?!? In addition, if I can't pay my bill online, using a card, because of that nonsense, what other options do I have to pay my bill?

Any advise / information is greatly appreciated!

dudara

Online payments are processed by third payments on behalf of the collecting company. It's very standard to be redirected to a tird party when paying. If you have never used "verified by visa" before and it is enabled on your card, then the payment processor will ask you to set it up. You'll likely face this issue again when you try to purchase online.

There are many ways to pay your Irish Water bill. See the FAQ page for more information.

http://www.water.ie/help-centre/questions-and-answers/how-can-i-pay-my-water-services-bill/?category=billing-&-charges

Spocker

Verified by Visa is a system used to prevent fraud with online merchants, I've used it quite often in the past, although it's not widely used (I believe its optional with the retailers)

Mastercards version is called Mastercard SecureCode

delahuntv

It simply is a fraud measure introduced by Visa & Mastercard (secircode for mastercard)

Many of the card processing merchants now insist on it though you can opt out by agreeing that any fradulent / disputed transaction is debited immediately from your merchant account until you prove that the transaction was valid.

When you sign up you will create a password of at least 6 characters. When verifying a purchase it will ask you for 3 specific charaters of the password. e.g the 1st, 2nd & 4th character.

Oryx

Irish Water are not enforcing this extra step, visa are. The only way to avoid it is to use a different type of card.

L1011

If you've never seen this before you clearly haven't bought much if anything online...

Its going to get allegedly simpler but likely far bloody worse: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/14/mastercard_visa_killing_off_password_auth/

rosenrot

I have purchased multiple other things on different other websites (incl. Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de and Ebay) but I have NEVER seen that Verified by Visa page before, not to mention, it is extremely WEIRD that this thing is not hosted on Visa's domain (visa.com), but on a different domain, thus making it no different than a phishing or network traffic sniffing attempt. :O And for the record, that Verified by VISA web page appearing out of the blue, technically can NOT happen without Irish Water's website, or the API they use to authenticate payments make a URL redirection request to the Verified by VISA page. I am saying all that as a person who works as a web developer.

Either way, such verification is extremely weird, the third party domain they host it on is highly suspicious and I will never pay my Irish Water bill by debit card again, because of that.

slimjimmc

AIB and BOI both use arcot.com for their Verified by Visa service
Here's AIBs site and BOIs

Carlos Orange

Verified by Visa is an awful solution but it is something Visa force on payment processors and companies that take payments using card. For the life of me I don't understand why they couldn't just use online banking to approve payments instead of forcing customer to remember another password and trust a random domain that customers know nothing about.

L1011

rosenrot wrote: »

I have purchased multiple other things on different other websites (incl. Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de and Ebay) but I have NEVER seen that Verified by Visa page before, not to mention, it is extremely WEIRD that this thing is not hosted on Visa's domain (visa.com), but on a different domain, thus making it no different than a phishing or network traffic sniffing attempt. :O And for the record, that Verified by VISA web page appearing out of the blue, technically can NOT happen without Irish Water's website, or the API they use to authenticate payments make a URL redirection request to the Verified by VISA page. I am saying all that as a person who works as a web developer.

Either way, such verification is extremely weird, the third party domain they host it on is highly suspicious and I will never pay my Irish Water bill by debit card again, because of that.

Their payment processor uses the redirect, as specified by your bank.

You're not going to be able to order a pizza or do much else beyond Amazon (one huge outlier in this case - they don't even ask for CVV2 numbers as far as as I know) without using 3dsecure these days.

delahuntv

rosenrot wrote: »

I have purchased multiple other things on different other websites (incl. Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de and Ebay) but I have NEVER seen that Verified by Visa page before, not to mention, it is extremely WEIRD that this thing is not hosted on Visa's domain (visa.com), but on a different domain, thus making it no different than a phishing or network traffic sniffing attempt. :O And for the record, that Verified by VISA web page appearing out of the blue, technically can NOT happen without Irish Water's website, or the API they use to authenticate payments make a URL redirection request to the Verified by VISA page. I am saying all that as a person who works as a web developer.

Either way, such verification is extremely weird, the third party domain they host it on is highly suspicious and I will never pay my Irish Water bill by debit card again, because of that.

<SNIP>

If you bought online regularly or even did the most basic of Google search about verified by Visa you would have had all the info you needed.

<SNIP>
Mod: Off topic comments removed

java

Every time I use Ticketmaster I get redirected to 'Verified by Visa'. Its not that uncommon.

haveringchick

Littlewoods BooHoo Misguided M&S all use Verified by Visa. It's certainly not phishing

Snoopy1

Even just eat uses this, which throws me everytime i want to order pizza, as i usually forget my password.
Get over it OP, its common