(courtesy Oreck, redacted copy published with his permission).

Offered rate: $6.487. Visa rate: $6.7695. Scalp: 4.17%

We had a combination of overseas and local (my) cards paying for the HKG DO dinner tonight. I glanced at the first slip to come back (slip on right) and started foaming in the mouth:

Me: (In Cantonese) (Pointing at the verbage) "This shouldn't be here! We don't want this! Can we make it go away???"
Waiter: "Tick it and its HKD"
[Huge amounts of arm waving on my part]: "It never is tick HKD and you get HKD. You must press a button. Do we have to press a button?"
Waiter continued: "There is no further action required. It will be processed as HKD."

I just blew up like Fukushima Daiichi Plant One at this point. I demanded to see the card terminal to have this voided. The waiter and Oreck followed me reluctantly.


I should note Oreck's position on this - he understands there may be some scalping involved, but he does not want to take issue with it. I respect that, it's his financial prerogative, and I admit to somewhat hijacking his transaction to pursue my own research for this thread.


In this event, no scalping took place.
At the Rainbow cashier desk, a lot got cleared up:

1. The cashier does indeed make a currency selection at the terminal after seeing the cardholder's tick box.

2. The cashier printed a courtesy copy of Oreck's slip (similar to my Maldives Taj Exotica courtesy copy but called a Reprint slip here) which had no DCC verbage and showed HKD charging very clearly (slip on left).

3. The cashier noted there has been similar concerns/objections from previous customers over their DCC offering, and they have taken steps to ensure cardholder choice is respected.

4. The cashier that had the cardholder ticked nothing, the card currency amount will be presumed to be selected, which is non-compliant but not the biggest DCC sin in the world.

I withdrew my objection and advised Oreck to sign and keep the cardholder and Reprint copies, which he did.

Another FTer at the DO also paid using her USD card. I demanded the Reprint for her also which was also HKD-only