Credit Card Fraud and Bad Databases

It's not that credit card workers are stupid. It's that their database systems are.
Had a call at the house from CitiBank, our credit card issuer. They had seen some "suspicious" transactions and wanted to know if we'd performed them or if someone else had.

One of the two was a gasoline purchase (a common ruse by thieves to find out if a card has been deactivated is to make a small purchase at a gas pump, swiping the card at the pump and avoiding the cameras in the store). The gas was purchased at "8:31 p.m." they said.

I was at home watching TV with my wife at 8:31 p.m. Yikes. Was it fraud?

Turns out the credit card employee was reporting it as 8:31 p.m. Central Time. We live in Oregon. At 6:31 p.m. PST (local) I was at the gas station buying gas.

I don't blame the credit card company's employee for reading the number on her screen. I blame a dumb database application that doesn't account for differences in time zones and doesn't report local times as such. It's a recipe for misunderstanding at the very least.

Is it any wonder we have a fraud epidemic, with rocket scientists like this designing the database applications?