Your experience is very typical, sadly. The detection accuracy is so hopeless that most people would be happier without it...

I have not had that problem. I have had to ring the bank or credit card company to verify that it is me making the transaction. Fortunately I keep a board with the last months transactions and can so identify my purchases. Though they could be better. They ask me to confirm the last few transactions and I have yet to have a problem. If I were a fraudster I would just confirm all were fine and they would authorise the current transaction. They should either ask questions that are much tougher for a fraudster to identify, such as last repayment. That will be different for all and if the fraudster had the card for a few days will know the last few transactions anyway.

Several years ago someone had cloned my card. Trying to buy a meal in South Africa 10 minutes after trying to by jewellery in Japan flagged it up to them.

From having worked in Customer Service at MBNA for a while, the problem with requesting those kinds of details is that 95% of the time the customer simply doesn't know that information off the top of their head, and as they are invariably in a shop at the time they don't normally have access to their paper records.

I fully appreciate that but I was doing this online so was ringing from home. I have a randomly generated password for online transactions and I am surprised it is not requested more often. Though if the person is ring from home then why can they not do a more thorough verification.

Surely all the crims would just use mobile phones if that was the case?

Yes but if they used a mobile then why don't the banks block the transaction till they can be contacted on a landline. I have had to do calls from shops for big purchases before and the store manager can do other checks.