Originally Posted by jaynyc
I'm guessing the 3% is the vig that the ripoffs charge to handle your foreign transaction. Has anyone had the experience where it was listed as a finance charge?
Your guess is correct. Citi has been putting the 3% in the finance charges for a couple of years now. I'm not sure what other card issuers put it there.
And I am guessing that Citibank is assuming I originally charged this amount to THAT card and 'refunded' the foreign exchange vig. Hey. I'm not complaining. I made $101.61 ^
That guess also sounds correct. Lucky you. Your Singaporean friends probably preferred to do it this way because they would have had to pay a wire transfer fee to wire it back to you, while "refunding" the money to a credit card probably SAVED them money, since it probably reduced the total commissions they had to pay to their merchant account provider by reducing their overall inflows for the accounting period. Technically, however, they probably violated their merchant account agreement, so you shouldn't expect too many others to do this.