Comment by andy99
1 day ago
> they tried to coax me into using my local currency instead of GBP and hid a £20 spread
I’m finding this more and more. Uber does it, and even Walgreens does it when I’m in the US and tap my card it suggests that I pay in my home currency. This seems to be a new vector companies have found for ripping off their customers.
What really pisses me off is that this stuff is annoying and sometimes fools us, tech savvy people on a hacker forum. I can't imagine how many elderly/non-techie people are being fleeced out of their money because of these kind of dark patterns.
Yup. Reminds me of how my dad would do his taxes at H&R Block, and then every year take out their “refund anticipation loan” (despite not having some big urgent expense). They deduct their overpriced tax prep fee and a healthy 150%APR interest payment from the proceeds but you get the money same day. You could just not do that and still have your refund in like a week. The APR is unconscionable given they did the taxes — they can be nearly certain your refund will arrive. But they just gloss over those details, probably by saying “Do you want your refund today, or wait on the IRS? With the Today option you can also just deduct your tax prep fee from the refund and not pay out of pocket.” I have a feeling they get a LOT of people with that scam.
Yup
I can never remember which option should I pick. And to be really honest I don't remember if I tried to see if it matched my bank's rate or not
Whenever I travel out of the country I always re-read my credit card policies on foreign currency conversion. Some cards are quite reasonable, some are ripoffs.
In 2025 it's decidedly old-fashioned to even think of interfering with the march of the orphan-crushing profit-maximising machine. Each quarter demands a fresh way to rip off people.
How quaint even the 90s seem today, and we though that was hyper capitalism!
You don't think people were ripping each other off in the '90s?
How old a saying is caveat emptor?
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This isn't anything new though. Been like that for the last 15 years at least. Always pay in the local currency (your bank/visa/mastercard will give you a better rate then the merchant)
It seems to be built into the credit card terminals. So it's a visa thing, not on the shop.
I had that with very small shops in non-touristy areas of Mexico where it was absolutely clear to not be a scam attempts by the shops owner. They had no idea what the terminal asked.
It's absolutely the shop.
Their payment processor (the people they rent the machine off of) offers them this oppurtunity to 'unlock hidden revenue for merchants'[1][2][3] and they are happy to do this.
Visa in fact tried to ban it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_currency_conversion
Of course, there are regulations and agreements with various institutions that should be followed - but it's free money for the shop, nothing else.
[1] https://www.shift4.com/blog/dynamic-currency-conversion-unlo...
[2] https://www.fexco.com/payments-and-fx/currency-conversion-so...
[3] https://docs.adyen.com/point-of-sale/currency-conversion/
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I don't think parent is claiming that the shop owner is trying to scam someone. But these prompts have been around for at least 15 years, I'm also sure about that, this isn't new by any measure. And yeah, also came across shop owners who don't know what it is about, and then you have to chose.
Makes sense that shop owners in non-touristy areas haven't seen them before, as you'll only see that when the card has a default currency that differs from the default currency of the terminal.
On the other hand, almost every merchant and waiter in Spain told me, when handing me the card terminal, to select "local currency" (decline the first swindle attempt) then "don't convert" (decline the second swindle attempt). There's obviously some required workflow where they must pass the terminal to the customer, but they are wise to the payment gateway's trick to extract additional value from the transaction. They don't want their customer bilked, or to take the reputational damage when the customer leaves an angry review.
So if your Mexican merchants "don't know" what their terminal says? Either you were their first foreigner, or they're useful idiots, or they know.
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What makes you think Visa is the only player in the payments chain between the merchant and your bank?
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Very true, but the other half is to ensure you don’t use a card with a foreign transaction fee, which will cost you 3-4%. There are free cards like the Amazon Prime Visa that don’t have it, but that fee is very common.
The other thing I hate to see is people using the currency conversion desks at airports, or buying foreign currency from their banks in advance of trips. They give you awful rates.
Assuming you’re traveling to a civilized country, just stick your card in an ATM when you land and pull out the cash you need. Good banks don’t even charge their own ATM fee, so your total cost is the $3-4 that the ATM owner charges, and you get a pretty fair rate.
> The other thing I hate to see is people using the currency conversion desks at airports
If I've just arrived home with $30 left of whatever currency was used in the place I came from, they could be taking a 30% cut and it would still be worth it to just due it there rather than physically visiting a bank.
That is, if the currency is one they're even willing to exchange.
Careful with random ATMs, some are scamtms.
When the ATM withdrawal usually costs you nothing, or in some cases when the bank does not have an agreement with the ATM company it can cost you 1,39$ then 3-4$ is a ripoff.
Also people buy currency locally - before the trip - where I am from, and all the rates are displayed, both in a bank or in currency exchange. You can compare. And even when someone is lazy they can just ask friends which place has the best rates, everybody seems to know which (and the answers are true and conistent, I checked). Buying locally at a currency exchange is the cheapest option.
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What is this "cash" you speak of?
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> Been like that for the last 15 years at least
Charging significantly more to accept foreign currencies goes back thousands of years.
This isn’t that. I understand if you came to a US store with Canadian dollars, they’d be unlikely to give you the posted exchange rate for them, if the took them at all. Here we’re talking about paying with a credit card that will automatically pay in the local currency, and having the POS terminal, on whoever’s behalf, try and intermediate that to charge a higher rate than the credit card would have, under the false pretence of simplifying payment somehow. It’s not convenience, it’s preying on ignorance.
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Ubiquitous currency exchange at the point of sale does not though.
When O'Leary accuses others of "scamming and ripping off unsuspecting consumers", what he really means is that only Ryanair should have the right to scam and rip off Ryanair passengers...
Years ago when paying with PayPal, there were 2 choices - for them to convert currencies or to rely on my bank to convert them. There was a warning that if I chose the second option, it could cost a lot. Turns out, with my bank the conversion was good and with PayPal's conversion I'd lose like 10%.
Stuff like that is what I say "years ago" - I haven't used PayPal for a while now, and I won't use it again.
This disappeared a few months ago for me, unfortunately.
Why do you say unfortunately? Are you saying PayPal now doesn’t allow you to pay directly in the foreign currency and let your bank convert?
I see the opposite quote a lot.
Advertised “No Fee” currency conversions, but a HUGE spread built into the conversion rate that comes out to a massive fee.
Point of sale terminals also do this when travelling - it wasn't especially surprising, just one straw too many.
Of course foreign exchange offices have been doing this scam since forever ("no fees!")...
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Edit - note that with a bureau d'exchange my objection is not that they charge for the exchange; clearly that is the exact business that they are in. It's the "no fees" etc. marketing that hides from the less astute punters exactly how (and how much) they are paying for the service. I'd like to see that outlawed and direct costs of the exchange up front (e.g. "Exchange £100 for $121.5 at a cost of £10 compared to the base rate")
> direct costs of the exchange up front
Isn't that fairly easy to estimate? If they're showing you a buy rate and a sell rate, you know the interbank rate is going to be pretty much halfway between the two. I don't think anyone's changing money and thinking the bureau isn't profiting.
I beg to differ. All their verbiage about not charging fees is absolutely intended to create that impression in less educated customers.
Honestly, to me the problem seems more like people don’t know they don’t have to use those things. Just pulling money out of an ATM (and yes, declining the currency conversion scam there as well) is a much more efficient and cheap way to acquire the local currency.
People use these desks because they think that’s just “what it costs.”
ATMs all over are like this. Very annoying. I have to decline conversation all the time. The ATM conversation rate is usually 15-25% markup. No thanks, my bank charges nothing, just passes on the Visa 1% fee for fx.
*conversion
Although it is amusing to imagine an ATM that accosts you verbally with smalltalk when you use it.
Coming soon , LLM to an ATM near you
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Surely if the ATM were to taunt you it would use C, or maybe JavaScript.
The big scam is some terminals are configured with 17% forex fees (looking at your shady restaurants in Budapest), really funny when it's paired with tips in an EU country.
But this is why Revolut and WISE cards are a god send when travelling, just load them up with the local currency and these issues disappear.
Wise cards are still issued in your home country however. My NZ-issued Wise card still triggers the DCC prompt so it's more or less the same as a NZ-issued card from any other provider. A common misconception but understandable given how Wise markets their card products.
Paying the local currency with your own cards seems simple and works?
If “your own cards” are with non-neobanks, they tend to offer poor exchange rates, and add commission on top.
Yes, zero Forex fees cards work. But the terminal detects that your home currency is different to the local currency and you still have to choose the right option.
For example, just the other day I fat fingered the screen and chose the wrong currency.
This is pretty much everytime in Europe, not sure if the local terminals or the chase chip card always prompts me to pay with 1) USD 2) EURO
Depends where in Europe. I saw it all the time in Spain but never in France.
ATMs do this as well. Always decline the bank doing the conversion.
The funny thing is that, at least for American consumers, there’s a good chance you’ll get mildly scammed by using your card in a foreign currency due to a 3%—4% junk fee that is common (I’d estimate 80% of non-premium cards have it). So the discovery of the “let us, the merchant, convert for you” scam has allowed merchants/payment networks to in some cases “steal” the scam from the card issuer (the card issuer then won’t take a fee if it’s in USD, but someone takes a fat margin on the currency). They’re all scumbags, all looking for ways to grift.
It’s been like that when visiting Europe for years now.
Do they suggest that you pay in your home currency, or do they give you the choice to select on the ATM? Only once a cashier made a suggestion and it was to warn me of the spread and that generally it'd be better to do it in USD and let my bank do conversion.
You get a prompt on the terminal. I’ve never had a cashier suggest anything to me, and I don’t really want their input. The correct answer is always pay in local currency and let your bank handle it.
I once came across a cashier that thought you had to select the foreign currency option. When I tried to pay in the local currency she cancelled the transaction.
Needed to get another member of staff to explain to her that the local currency option would work fine.
I mean American companies have done the "$1000, well that's also £1000 then!" bullshit for ages.