goofygoofygooberyeah

Recently I made a purchase and realized I had entered something wrong, so I immediately refunded the purchase less than a minute later. I immediately called Citi to make sure they saw the refund process, and they confirmed they saw both the purchase and the refund.

A couple days later the 2 charges appeared, but there was a difference of 0.6% between the two, with the refund of course being less. As this was a large transaction it meant quite a few dollars disappeared. Looking into the FX rates for that day, it seems Citi charges about 0.5% above the interbank rate for when making a purchase, and then when making a refund they are about 0.1% below.

In my mind this is a hidden form of an FX fee, which isn't really true to the spirit of an FX fee free card. Do I have any option to challenge this?

mia

The rates are set by MasterCard, not by Citi.

When you made the purchase you were selling dollars and buying the other currency. When you reversed the transaction you were selling the other currency and buying dollars. The published "mid-market" rates are an average of those two types of transactions.

There is extensive discussion in THIS thread, but probably not many examples of transaction reversed on the same posting date as the original.

moe8555

If the rates drastically changed by the time the refund was made, could one theoretically get a larger refund than the original purchase? Or do they have stopgaps in place to avoid things like that?

Richard Berg

I don't see how they could (or should) prevent that.