Originally Posted by
Midships
One issue now in Malaysia, is that you cannot top up your Grab wallet cash balance with a visa from outside of Malaysia, (or at least that was the position late last year).
Three things that come to mind:
1) Credit card merchant fees. Grab wallet is as good as cash. I am not sure if Grab charges a fee to topup your e-wallet using a credit card but the CC merchant fees are higher for cards issued outside Malaysia (maybe around 2-3%) where as a local bank is around (1-1.6%).
2) Money laundering. Since grab wallet is as good as cash, it can be misused to pay with a foreign credit card to get cash in Malaysia (would involve a lot of effort to wash say just $10k USD tho lol)
3) CC fraud. Consumers can report it as a fraud but the Grab wallet user already has "cash" deposited into his account and could have used it to pay off other things. The user could have gotten a stolen credit card number and used it to topup Grab wallet.