Many Britons heading off for the sun rely on their credit cards to fund their day to day holiday expenses – but they are playing a dangerous game.

Rising credit fraud, especially relating to transactions abroad, has led credit card companies to impose tougher operating criteria on all overseas transactions. This means that you are quite likely to have your card swallowed when you present your card to a cash machine as operators query almost any overseas transaction.

Some commentators have recommended that the way to avoid this problem is to tell your card operator beforehand that you are going on holiday. With some companies like Barclays, HBOS and HSBC this may help but it won’t guarantee that your card doesn’t get eaten. With most of the other operators, telling them won’t help a jot as their computer systems simply can’t store that information, let alone alter the fraud protection criteria on your card.

We could be arriving at the situation where card companies simply do not want you to use your card abroad. Certainly their policy of querying or rejecting a large proportion of overseas transactions would indicate this.

Our advice is, if at all possible do not use your card abroad. Use traveller’s cheques. And if you have to use your card, use it at stores and restaurants etc not at hole in the wall cash points. If you do this, then if your card is declined, at least you won’t have it swallowed up.