Comment by onli
1 day ago
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/
I doubt it. One person shops with no relevant contact to foreigners. Maybe the enterprise organising a credit card terminal for them activates it.
I've had one person shops try to convince me to pay in USD when I try to pay in the local currency.
1 reply →
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.
I just think they genuinely don't know. I was years into travelling before I learned about this 'trick'.
For my part, I'd just always assumed the charge would be ultimately converted by my bank in any case. Seems obvious now I look back, but I honestly just didn't think about the trick.
Just as an example that gives evidence for this, sometimes you'll go to the same place multiple times and the norm is they ask but occasionally someone won't. So it's not a policy.
I presume the people who don't just don't know about it, don't want to bother me and aren't aware it will make a difference.
> Either you were their first foreigner
He could have merely been the first to do the math and bring it up. I could easily see most tourists overlooking this sort of thing, or not mentioning it because they're already accustomed to it.
What makes you think Visa is the only player in the payments chain between the merchant and your bank?
The visa logo printed on the terminals where this behaviour occurred.