Life lesson - In case you're not aware

I have been working in the IS arena of major banks for 20 years and have worked specifically with some of these risk score models and AML (anti money laundering) programs. As others have said, it's all for yours and the banks protection against fraud, theft and AML. The solution is very simple, let your bank know you are on vacation and travelling and to where. The risk models are set up to automatically flag accounts with suspicious activity using about 1000 points of data to create a behavior score as well as transaction types and transactions at certain types of business that are inherently high risk. Deviate from the behavior score and it gets flagged. Frankly I think it makes perfect sense. While perhaps a small inconvenience to alert them prior to travel, the inverse would (and has been) catastrophic where these risk models are not in place. Most if not all is OCC and FED mandated now.