Originally Posted by carrotjuice

I've been travelling to HKG rather frequently of late and noticed there's this restaurant that I dined at regularly - every time I was presented the CC slip and I ticked to be charged in HKD, I still ended up being charged in SGD via that dreadful DCC!

After a few times, I decided to 'confront' the restaurant and asked the restaurant manager how their CC chargings were done.

He actually showed me step-by-step using the CC machine... swiped the card and the machine was programmed to AUTOMATICALLY charge in the card issuing currency, regardless of what I had selected on the CC slip. There wasn't a prompt on the CC machine that gave the restaurant an ability to over-ride SGD with HKD at any time throughout the process.

I told the restaurant manager that this process was wrong. He said he would "check with his bank".

But sure enough, after I came home, I noticed that the latest restaurant bill was charged in HKD. So he did check with his bank after all, and instructed the change.

Seems that CC machines can be automatically programmed to charge in the card currency... and the merchant has to ask his acquiring bank to either revert to a prompted process or to manually over-ride a transaction to be charged in the respective local currency before it's settled.

But the challenge is... you wouldn't know whether the CC machine has been pre-programmed to convert automatically unless you actually see process happen before you... regardless of what currency choice you may tick on the CC slip!