CITIC Imposes Limits on Alipay Payments

Tencent Tech, 11/04/08

CITIC Bank recently announced that from November 1, 2008, it will impose monthly transaction limits on payments through third-party payment platform Alipay that are linked to its credit cards. Under the new limits, every cardholder will be restricted to conducting RMB 1,000 in online transactions using Alipay each month. These restrictions apply across all cards held by a single cardholder, but do not apply to CITIC Blue Cards.

Among the 12 banks currently cooperating with Alipay, Minsheng Bank, Shenzhen Development Bank, China Industrial Bank, and Agricultural Bank of China only support payments linked to debit cards. The China Merchant's Bank, Guangdong Development Bank, CITIC and Everbright Bank permit credit card payments, but restrict payments to RMB 500 per transaction.

Editor's Note: The restriction by many banks on using credit cards comes due to rampant abuse of fraudulent transactions to receive interest free cash advances and loans using credit cards. To do this, a user, in collaboration with a trusted friend, will establish a fake online auction for a non-existent item with the price set to the limit of the credit card. The credit card owner will "purchase" the item, paying with their credit card. Once they "confirm" that the non-existent goods have been delivered, the money will be transferred to the friend's Alipay account, and can be withdrawn as cash from a normal bank account without incurring any fees, interest or limits normally placed on cash advances when taking a cash advance on a credit card.

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