By looking at the info, my feeling is that the extra miles for oversea transactions in foreign currency is more like a offset of foreign currency conversion fee, right?

You see, you get 1 HKD for 2 HKD to 20HKD, and the conversion fee is like 2%? 1 for 2 is kind of an earning, but 1 for 20 just covers the conversion fee IMO...

Can I assume HK banks are doing to just to promote oversea usage of their cards? Any other benefits to them?

This is not like cards in the US that rewards has nothing to do with where you spend.

Bit more than offset. Let's just say miles cost a bit under HK$0.07 (US$0.009).

Citi promo: $2/mile = .07/2 = 3.5%
HSBC promo: HK$20 spend = 1 RC = 15 miles = $1.05. $1.05/20 = 5.25%

The fee is 1.95%, of which V/MC takes 1% and banks 0.95%.
Even if RewardCash is exchanged for goods 95% of its face value (they can be exchanged for a form of store credit at supermarkets) then the rebate is still 4.75% > 1.95%.

Hope you can't pay your bill and rack up finance charges I guess.

Or spend so much you bust your promo limits and get ordinary earn at around $1/$250 spend.

I don't think that is a proper use of chargeback. You are only supposed to dispute the cost of goods or services you did not receive as agreed upon. For example, if you book a round trip ticket and the airline goes bankrupt after you use the first segment, you would only chargeback the portion you couldn't use. Since you did receive the goods you wanted to buy but you did not request the service of currency conversion, you should only chargeback the latter.

Nahh.

That's not what the Fair Credit Billing Act says. The entire amount is disputed because the total amount charged is not correct. Charges in the wrong amount are billing error amounts. See, e.g., http://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles...t-card-charges.

The FTC site is a tad out of date since the Federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau took over most of the consumer credit card area but it is correct on this. Take a look at the FCBA if you want to know more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Credit_Billing_Act but remember that it has to be read in conjunction with the relevant Federal Reserve Board Regulations and staff commentary.

Best book in the area (highly technical) is the National Consumer Law Center's Truth in Lending work. http://shop.consumerlaw.org/truthinlending.aspx. Most decent law libraries have a copy.

I'm not even concerned about US law as neither I nor acquirer need to be under US jurisdiction to effect a chargeback.

What you've mentioned is covered by Visa International Operating Regulations Reason Code 30 Services Nor Provided or Merchandise Not Received.

That's one chargeback reason code. There are 21 other chargeback reason codes in the VIOR, including Duplicate Processing, Paid by Other Means, and (most relevant here) Reason Code 76 Incorrect Currency or Transaction Code or Domestic Transaction Processing Violation

Sorry my math messed up...

20HKD in spending getting 1HKD back is quite a lot. In US normally it's 1 USD for 100 USD spending. Periodically you have 5% cash back with some cards in some categories.

Three people and a whole lot of sake... :D but really Australia is that expensive.

Yes, the PDF of the statement makes it seem like the posting date/exchange rate is 6/9 for those six transactions, but if I look at the activities page online the posting date for all of those transactions is listed as 6/10. If I use the Visa USA exchange rate for 6/10, I'm able to reconcile the transaction down to the cent.

So the process is the same. I haven't filed a dispute in a long time, so I didn't know if things had changed.

This would be the ideal resolution, but Chase's current process doesn't allow that to happen directly. One outcome if they become too inundated with DCC refund requests is that they could add in an option of "I wasn't offered the option of paying in my local currency." However, for small DCC scalps in absolute terms - I don't know what the threshold is here - they likely issue a courtesy credit to avoid the paperwork. For something like a hotel or expensive meal where the amount is $20 or more, they'd likely like a Reason Code 76 chargeback.

This is my thought process, at least for the US. The USD amount (and category bonuses, if any) determine the rewards earned. It's probably not worth it for an issuer like Chase to file a chargeback for smaller transactions, so they just issue a courtesy credit. Furthermore, if you look at the documentation percysmith provided, I see there is a minimum amount of $25 to file a Reason Code 76 chargeback. I guess that might be the threshold amount? It seems like if you're hit with DCC at a Burger King in Ireland that your bank would have to eat the DCC difference if you complained.

Yes, in the case of a DCC chargeback it's more of the mentality of saying to the merchant, "Go back and charge this transaction in the correct (local) currency." The Reason Code 76 isn't asking for a refund of all of your money. It is a request to process the transaction without DCC.

Now it makes complete sense. For reference, here is the link to the avoided DCC attempt at the Taj Exotica Maldives. If they had charged you in HKD you would have lost nearly 6000 miles. While in the US rewards earnings don't really matter and the only loss is the DCC markup, I think the above point from percysmith needs to be emphasized and can help us win the messaging battle against DCC.

While some people don't care that they're getting ripped off on the DCC for the "convenience" of knowing the charge in the home currency, I think most people would go completely ballistic if you told them there's the possibility that if you accept DCC that you won't get any rewards for the transaction. (That's presumably why the person is using the card in the first place.)

^

Also, I would like to point out rewards in the US matter (at least to me :p, that's why I have numerous hotel cards from Chase, Marriott, RC, IHG, to get 5x in those chains), but the system just doesn't care whether home currency or foreign currencies are used. The final points are calculated with the posted USD amount, no matter who handles the conversion.

This way I don't have the double pressure like percysmith has, that you have to firstly avoid DCC, and secondly make sure done DCCs are voided and processed in local currencies again to get the points/miles. Here I just dispute DCCs with Chase and let them decide what to do, and I get points/miles nevertheless.

For un-voidable transactions, I would be happy to accept refunds in, say, euros. At the end of the day, I just dispute the difference between the DCCed USD amount, and the USD amount converted from the refunded EUR amount, and call it a day, because CSP has no FTF.

We are fortunate that we don't have the pressure like he does, but we can use this argument to our advantage in the fight against DCC. Including language that says, "Depending on the rewards structure of your credit card, sometimes you won't get any miles or points for the transaction if you accept DCC." This way it's more substantive than arguing over a couple of cents.

Our case isn't quite as severe. The only loss is the markup on the DCC with a 0% FTF card and credit of the miles and points anyway. The only loss with the chargeback would be losing whatever additional miles or points the DCC markup generated.

I just did some calculation. Yes, the rate used on the Chase statement is different from any of the dates adjacent to the posting date. But by using the visa.com rate on the posting date shown on the activities page, multiply it by the foreign currency amount, and round it to the hundredth, you get the correct USD amount charged to the card (without DCC of course).

I guess even though the rates look different, the stuff smaller than the hundredth just doesn't do anything...

I'd rather forfeit the 2 cents and keep the whole dollar :D

Yep, this was the process I was following the other day to reconcile the amounts. If you round to the nearest cent using the conversion rate for the date the transaction posted to your online activity and multiply by the foreign currency amount, you'll get an amount that matches the posted amount. It hasn't failed me yet. I just had another transaction post from Taiwan Mobile this evening (7/29 posting date). I did an online recharge of my account for 300 TWD x 0.033376 USD/TWD = 10.01 USD. The transaction posted for $10.01. ^

So at least when the unavoidable DCC transaction comes up with Chase, we can know how much we likely should have been charged.

@percysmith:

Remember your St. Regis slip? It has a term "app code" on it.

After studying non-DCC BoC slips, I think this "app" might just be the mechanism for DCC conversion, because there is no this extra line of "app code" on non-DCC slips from BoC terminals.

Interesting, huh?

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_1_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11D257 Safari/9537.53)

All transactions have approval codes unless you fall under a certain txn limit where the merchant chooses to forgo approval for greater speed (in HK, merchants can opt to do this for transactions <HK$200).

You need approval code once above it, whether DCC or not. That's the only way they can hold the hkd amount (in the Maldives case they have app code, they just didn't post for DCC)