Hmmm
 

I'm trying to maximize my return, while minimizing my amount of work spent. I have estimated my days out of the country, and it's over 600, but I've been with 4 different companies, and let's just say around 10 different cards. So, I don't want to do option 3.

I look at 2, and it asks my travel purpose. I would say this is close to 50% business, 50% vacation. What do you think these questiions mean? The choices are Biz, Visit friends, vacation, or other, and the selections range from never to mostly (and you can click all of them mostly, it's real intuitive, one would think mostly would = 1 choice.)

My guess is that if you click business, they will assume a coporate card, and disallow a large chunk. If you select visit friends, they might assume you do not incur a hotel charge, and have a reduced per diem, again just a guess...

ANy insight into the use here?

I registered for this before and entered the amount of transactions by year already. I received a notice today that says that I don't have to do anything and option 3 will already be taken for me. Anyone else get that?

I've read over the materials several times, and I'm still not clear on one thing:

Does this include ATM withdrawals using cards (Cirrus, Plus, etc) that do NOT have the Visa/MC logo?

Option 2 is pretty easy to do by looking at entry/exit stamps on your passports. In 15 minutes I was able to determine that I'd been out of country about 163 days during the effective period (not much by some standards, but could reasonably net me a few hundred dollars). I selected "mostly" for vacation and "often" for business.

Unless you are choosing Option 3 you don't have to make any statement or claim regarding what card, if any, was used for charging or ATM withdrawals.

I want to know the same thing. I'm tempted to do option 3 as I have every charge in Quicken over the last 12 years. It would be MUCH higher value if I'm allowed to do atm withdrawls

I believe the answer to that is no. Per the Preliminary Approval Order PDF document. No mention of non-branded, Cirrus/Plus/Star cards which would likely be spelled out explicitly if included.

Cirrus and Plus are owned by MC and Visa, respectively. (Maestro is also owned by MC but I don't know if they are on any US cards.) The back of my MC debit card has a Cirrus logo on it. So I'd be very surprised if the settlement didn't include ATM withdrawals using pure ATM cards.

I disagree, but then I can't say for certainty either direction and thus for no one else has so we've not really gotten anywhere.

Cirrus and Plus are not Mastercard and Visa branding by my personal interpretation.

I'm pretty curious about this whole thing. I would expect at least 10% of the population in the US to have used a CC abroad in the last 10 years. That's $30M ppl. $300M divided to $30 is about $10/person. Assuming 1/3 of the people don't respond, that would be $15 a person. Still, with this offer it seems that the least people will get (unless dumb) is $25. Which one of my assumptions is off?

The last one. If there isn't enough money for everyone to get $25, then the payments get proportionally reduced.

I got my form in the mail. The first paragraph says the following

So I can include my ATM transactions on all of my trips. I travel fairly cheaply so I'm curious if I'm better off doing option 2 to go with the average

What formulas did you use to come up with Option 2?

An hour or so of reports from MS Money found $63000 in eligible transactions. I'd say it's worth it for me to go for options #3.

I've kept my AT&T Visa though I left the U.S. (non U.S. citizen/resident) in the middle of 1997 and have only spent a maximum of a total of 3 months in the U.S. since, so I can put int some 3,500 days under Option 2. On Option 3, I probably could claim at least $1k a year. Which would be better?

FWIW, my card number just got changed due to some fraud prevention move so I'm comfortable providing a defunct Visa account.

Where did you have to enter an account number for Option 1 or Option 2? On my form only Option 3 asked for account numbers. The online form bounces if you miss an entry so I know I gave them every thing they were asking for.