CITI Credit Card Company Bogus Foreign Exchange Fees Sioux Falls South Dakota

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U.S. online shoppers hit with 'foreign' fee


Get used to it - Banks and credit card companies are screwing their BEST CUSTOMERS - to pay for their bad business decisions.

Its going to get a lot worse before it gets better - if it ever gets better.

PayPal is a funny service and I get so tired of calls involving it.

We have a system that records your transactions and provides us with some basic information on it. This system is not as specific as some people seem to think, but it does record two things of note to your complaint. The first is the location of the merchant. That would be the HKG. The second is the currency in which the charge is billed. Now, forgive me, but I don't have the system in front of me right now obviously because I would never post to this site from a work computer. But in this case, I'm confident in saying three things:

A) The HKG on your bill is probably not from PayPal. It matches the same format that we use to mark locations of charges on the statement, and while it's possible it's part of PayPal's merchant description (because HKG is a pretty common abbreviation), everything you stated matches our own standard notations. If our system recognizes a foreign merchant, it'll charge a fee. And our system does not guess. The only way it will know something is a foreign merchant is if the merchant, or PayPal, or something in the transaction information told us it was.

B) When a mark pops up to state it's from a certain country, you can bet money that the currency recorded is also in foreign currency. I don't work for PayPal, and I have no experience with how their system works so I won't argue about it, but when we show the details for your transaction, very likely it's going to show Chinese currency was used, and that right there will trigger a foreign transaction fee.

C) No CSR is going to help you because we can't. You want someone with more authority than we have. You can write all the letters and emails you want but good luck getting something done with that. You want to call customer service, ask to speak to an account manager and plead your case with them. However, there are two things working against you. While some customers will always disagree, Citibank was extremely generous is returning fees, finance charges, so on. The people complaining on this site probably didn't experience that, but I give dozens upon dozens of credits every day and only a handful of refusals. But, these days the company has decided to enforce the card agreement more rigorously and stop giving out refunds so freely. And, foreign transaction fees were almost never credited before, and I can promise you that any CSR who gives you a credit for one now will find himself in a meeting trying to keep his job. And I can promise this, because we got a memo saying so. If you speak to an account manager and they say they cannot credit it, that means they cannot credit it. The length of time you've been a customer does not matter because the card agreement doesn't make that kind of distinction. So read that agreement carefully, because this may be a case where the charge will not be waived, and you should pay careful attention to what that document says we can and cannot do. If you lost your copy, give us a call and we'll send you another. Despite popular myth, it's not terribly long, and it is not in legalese.

Good luck, David. Here's hoping you win this one.