Anyone hear of Citibank cards (e.g. Costco & American Airlines) not able to be added to Apple Pay due to some "high risk flag" on a cell phone plan?
I recently tried adding my Citibank cards (Costco Visa and American Airlines Mastercard) to Apple Pay and I get the error message after accepting the terms and conditions stating "Card Not Added, Contact your card issuer for more information. Add Card Later". I tried adding it through the NFC scan, then I tried the OCR reader scan, then I manually entered the information. All failed with the same message. Same thing happens with trying to add it to my watch. I searched Google and found quite a few hits on people who have posted on message boards about this same problem, with many also having the same issue. But no one had any real solution other than in rare instances, the problem just seemed to go away.
I called the customer service number on the back of the credit card and the rep stated that it probably an issue with some sort of fraud flag and they went to talk to the fraud department. I was then told that it seems my phone number account is flagged as high risk and because of that they will not allow their card to be added to Apple Pay. I was told to talk to my cell phone plan provider (AT&T) to see what they can do about it.
So I called AT&T knowing that I was going to lost in purgatory because my cell phone number is company number and is just one number in a HUGE contract that my company has with AT&T. So as expected, the AT&T agent had no idea about what to do about figuring out what this flag is, whether it is attached to my phone number or to the corporate account; and even if he knew he didn't know how to have that flag lifted. And even if that flag was lifted, how long would it take before Citibank would see that it is cleared?
I know a lot of personal information was breached recently from National Public Data (including phone numbers) and that data is now showing up on the dark web. If Citibank is using that as a source to filter out high-risk accounts, it could explain why I have heard many people having issues adding Citibank cards to their Apple Pay.
Anyway, my question is simple but I know the answer is hard ... How do I resolve getting this "high-risk flag" cleared that Citibank is saying is associated with my company phone number so I can add these two credit cards to Apple pay on a phone that I own, but the cell plan is through my company?
iPhone 16
