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Protect Your Money With BillGuard

Sick of reviewing your credit card statements every month? Check out BillGuard for iOS (or Android). It verifies all your charges with you on your smartphone and points out ones it suspects are fraudulent.

I’ve been using it for a week and it already saved me $49. Not bad for a free app.

Author Description

Louie Helm is a Machine Learning Engineer

10 Responses to “Protect Your Money With BillGuard”

  1. May 27

    Jay Freeman

    I am very curious how they managed to save you $49. I have ended up in conversations and arguments with the people running the company, and frankly I don’t even think they understand how credit card fraud works.

  2. May 27

    Louie Helm

    It caught a charge for an order that a company didn’t ship (and also didn’t refund).

  3. May 27

    Jay Freeman

    That is the kind of thing I’d imagine you’d catch by looking at your normal credit card statement. Did BillGuard actually flag it as “suspicious”? If they are selling things and not shipping them it is going to be fairly easy to get their merchant account pulled (which is why the entire concept of these “suspicious” charges is kind of silly).

  4. May 27

    Louie Helm

    I wonder how much of their “misunderstanding” is based on needing to misunderstand in order to convince their investors that their company’s value will grow with “network effects”?

  5. May 27

    Jay Freeman

    Right: to be clear, I use the word “misunderstanding” with implied air quotes. A similar issue on that front (which for all I know isn’t the case anymore: I was arguing with them a year ago) is that I don’t think the website made it clear to people that their random comments about vendors were posted not just for their own information, not just to BillGuard so they could look into it, not just to other users of BillGuard who have interacted with that merchant, and not even just to other users of BillGuard, but that they were posted publicly on BillGuard’s website: I think users end up posting private information about their payment history, or saying things in ways that they wouldn’t normally do in public; and even if you think it is expected for information like comments, I don’t think it is something most users expect from the less-information-filled green checkmark to “approve this charge”.

  6. May 27

    Louie Helm

    Of course it would have been possible in principle to catch this by reviewing my credit card statement at the end of the month. But I don’t honestly do that anymore since it’s a boring chore and the volume of purchases to review every month is too large and old by the time it piles up that much. I believe I’m not alone in this reguard. Reviewing charges in an app on my phone when I’m otherwise not busy is a different and better workflow.

  7. May 27

    Jay Freeman

    (Apparently, you have some kind of mechanism set up that is taking my comment that I thought was being posted in one context on Facebook and being copied onto Disqus to be shown on your blog in a way where no subsequent responses are being copied and the one post isn’t tied to my Disqus account so I can’t manage it; that’s far afield into bad form.)

  8. May 27

    Jay Freeman

    (Yeah; I’m un-friending you now; this is kind of insane. There are things I will say in public on Facebook that I would never say in public on your blog, due to the difference in how search works for the different systems; it is not acceptable that you don’t understand the difference.)

  9. May 27

    Louie Helm

    Good talking to you. See you around.

  10. May 28

    David Salamon

    To anyone confused by what happened here: Louie copied Jay’s responses to his blog without permission.