The Visa/MC are stricter than that. They specify that the customer has to be presented with a clear choice with no preferential treatment given to DCC. That would knock 90% of the DCC offerings I've seen out of compliance:

• Automatic opt-in to DCC - no currency preference or even an implicit currency preference (such as writing in a tip in local currency) results in getting hit with DCC
• Confusing/convoluted methods to opt out - eg) Print next receipt?, ENQUIRY?, USD/HKD 0.122 OK? - where you have to press no/cancel or some other non-intuitive button
• Flag of card's currency takes up 90% of screen with a big OK button and a message "For HKD press HERE" shows up at the bottom in 8 pt font

The vast majority of DCC offerings I've seen wouldn't pass muster with Visa or MC if they actually cared about enforcing their regulations. But it's just like in the EMV thread. We read reports of some European merchants saying, "Sorry, no 'American' cards accepted." Others say non-PIN/non-EMV transactions are refused even though there are accept-all-cards policies. Some merchants stateside will refuse to complete a credit card transaction without ID which is against payment network policy if the card has been signed. Rarely do the payment networks enforce these rules.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again... I think the biggest culprits here are the acquirers. They stand the most to gain from the DCC scalp, and they are off the hook when a customer files a Reason Code 76 chargeback. It's the merchant's problem in that case. However, in the vast majority of cases where customers are duped into accepting DCC the acquirer makes a healthy profit on the exchange, throwing a pittance to the merchant for helping perpetuate the scam.

"The vast majority of DCC offerings I've seen wouldn't pass muster with Visa or MC if they actually cared about enforcing their regulations. " it'll be nice if some EU jurisdiction can fine Visa and Mastercard for their negligence much like Italy fined Tripadvisor. The only lcpurt action I know is the Australiab ACCC buttfxckedly suing V/M for not allowing more of it! But such devine acts cannot be worked towards, only prayed for.

Guess I got lucky, that the staff at Al Molo knew how to do this, and I insisted seeing the confirmation slip.

To me, it's very probably that Greyhound Cafe/Coyote guys didn't learn how to operate the opt-outs. Of course the acquirer is the main culprits here, but since some of the Global Payment merchants know the stuff, I still blame the ones that don't do their homework.

My guess now is that all terminals in HK, if they cannot disable DCC preemptively, they should have the feature to opt-out later by calling the transaction back. I remember at Al Molo they keyed in the trans/batch/or whatever 6-digit number of the transaction, and pressed some selection keys, then I got the confirmation slip showing only HKD.

BTW, their markup was 4.2%, stated on the currency selection slip.

Consumer groups love DCC because merchants love DCC. Remember banks are bad and merchants love you lots.

Yep, I had explained in this earlier post about the winners and losers of DCC, at least for US issued cards. In the worst case, everybody except the customer is a loser. In other cases like HK, the card issuer can be the loser as the issuer misses out on currency exchange fees. (In the US almost all cards charge FTF, so the issuer would win in the case of DCC.)

But I agree. It would take some serious court action to smack the acquirers into shape. However, it's unlikely to happen as DCC is rare in the US, and those who've encountered it say that it is easy to opt out in the US.

If anyone's wondering, DCC is finally being implemented in Japan. I just got hit with it a couple hours ago. Fairly easy to avoid, but I have no idea what I would've been taken for because all it prompted was 外貨決済(DCC)対象カードです はい\いいえ (Essentially "This card can do payments in foreign currency (DCC) yes/no"). Pushing "no" produced a DCC-free slip.

Where in Japan? It seems like this disease is spreading... :mad: What if I didn't have access to the terminal in Japan, and the cashier didn't know what it was and just pressed accept?

it was a secondhand electronics shop in downtown Tokyo. Not surprising, since it's a shop a lot of tourists seem to shop at. The only advice I can give with regards to the second point is that the terminal will always be visible and somewhat accessible to you in a Japanese shop (at least the chain where the DCC was attempted), so just watch the screen.

Here's an example of how clueless cashiers can be, earlier today I had to re-run my card because the cashier accidentally hit "no" for signature verification (if the signature matched) - they don't read the prompts at all. Thus, who can trust them to offer the DCC choice?

You sadly can't trust cashiers to get the DCC choice correct. Even if the cashier is an hourly low wage earner at a chain store or restaurant with no immediate vested interest in whether or not you accept DCC it's still impossible to control the transaction completely. Factor in that there might be language barriers - note the recent example from jamar - where you might not be able to explain to the cashier that you want local currency. It's just like getting into arguments with merchants about magstripe only cards in EMV countries. It's a losing battle.

You try to stop DCC in its tracks at the time of the transaction. If unsuccessful, you deface the receipt and file a chargeback.

I should note, however, that there is one circumstance where I would possibly accept DCC. If I were stuck with nothing but my Canadian credit/debit card I would take it over the double-whammy TD slaps on foreign transactions not in USD/EUR/GBP/AUD- for transactions in other currencies, say in JPY, TD first converts to USD +2.5% then to CAD +2.5%, effectively taking a little over 5% as a FX commission. Direct conversion to CAD only happens with those four currencies.

This was fairly well-hidden in the cardholder agreement and I only noticed when looking to make sure that the 2.5% listed currency conversion fee was just for forex and not for all foreign transactions. Of course, actual Canadians have more choices than I do, and thus would be able to avoid this problem with a 0% card from Chase. Sadly, the DCC-proof AmEx would be even worse for Canadians because AmEx Canada converts all non-USD foreign currencies to USD before converting to CAD, making it not worth it unless buying something where purchase protection was necessary.

Do terminals in the US even ask this anymore? I've noticed on a lot of independent merchant terminals in the US it just seems to print out two receipts which both have signature sections on them and one of them has to be signed. By this point the transaction seems to be over from the terminals point of view.

Terminals aren't always particularly clear though, I know in Marks and Spencers in the UK, the POS just asks "Is card valid?".

I haven't seen many of them them ask for it. You're definitely correct that most systems print out two receipts simultaneously, the merchant copy and the customer copy. This setup is especially common in restaurants. You could sign your name as anything (or not even sign), and they transaction will have already gone through.

You said that Red Lobster and Olive Garden used to pull the DCC game but don't seem to anymore? When they did do this, did your receipts already come out in GBP or was it the HKG style of "enter tip in TXN currency" variety of receipt?

It would say something like "Thank you for allowing First Data (I think) to convert your USD XXX transactions into XXXX GBP at the conversion rate of XXXX". You never had any choice in the matter and when I spoke to staff they seemed as clueless as I was and didn't seem to think the transaction had been done any differently to a US card. I just gave up in the end and usually paid by Amex and occasionally Diners Club (As transactions have a habit of getting lost and never making it onto my UK Diners Club account, especially in the early days of the Discover/Diners network merge).

That's sneaky and definitely non-compliant. I'd put that up there with some of the merchants in Mainland China. :td:

I imagine the waitstaff would have been clueless because most of them wouldn't know what to do in that situation. Perhaps at the Times Square or Florida locations they would have seen this before, but I can't imagine a waiter at the Olive Garden in Kokomo, Indiana would know anything about DCC or have even swiped a non-US card before.