This summer’s biggest points swindle

Travel websites are asking you to do something strange this summer. They want you to write to Congress and beg lawmakers not to lower your credit card fees.

That’s right, sites that claim to work for consumers are running petition drives against a bill that could make prices more affordable. 

The bill is the Credit Card Competition Act (CCCA), and it would require the biggest banks to let more than one network process your credit card. The proposed law has bipartisan support, including an unexpected endorsement from the president.

The CCCA would lower the swipe fee merchants pay every time you buy something. Fees run about 2 to 3 percent of the purchase, and sometimes more. Merchants build the cost into their prices, and you pay them whether you know it or not.

Last week, the advocacy group Demand Progress reported that the credit card industry had already spent $200 million since 2023 to defeat the legislation. That’s because the CCCA has a real shot at becoming law. Sponsors tried attaching it onto a cryptocurrency bill in January, and they’ve said they’ll keep looking for a bigger package to tie it to.

Which brings me back to those strange petitions.

Credit card swipe-fee misdirection

The pitch this summer is always some version of “protect your rewards,” warning that the bill will eviscerate your points balance unless you tell Congress to stop it. There’s even a handy form: You fill in your name and ZIP code, and it fires off a pre-written letter to your representatives.

These drives run in partnership with the credit card industry’s lobbyists. The banks have their own campaign called “Hands Off My Rewards,” run by their trade group, the Electronic Payments Coalition, whose members include JPMorgan Chase, Capital One and Visa. The airlines have one called “Protect Our Points,” funded by Airlines for America. The travel websites just mobilize the readers.

It’s a classic misdirection. A bank lobbying campaign gets dressed up as consumer activism, and the audience provides the outrage for free. The industry couldn’t buy that kind of authenticity. 

It didn’t have to. The sites handed it over to the travel “experts.” One site openly admits that it’s teamed up with the Electronic Payments Coalition to amplify the message. Its readers have mailed thousands of letters to Congress, all defending the banks.

Your travel ‘expert’ works for the bank

You might wonder why a travel site would carry water for the banks.

Maybe it’s because these sites aren’t news organizations at all, but affiliate marketers wearing a press badge. They earn hundreds of dollars in commissions every time a reader signs up for a credit card through their links. The content—the reviews, the rankings, the breathless “best cards of 2026” lists—is nothing more than a storefront to sell more credit cards. 

The same banks that pay these sites to push cards also fund the lobby fighting this bill. Lower swipe fees mean reduced bank margins, which means less cash flowing back to the sites that sell the cards. 

They aren’t protecting your points, they’re protecting their own paycheck—and your points are the bait.

Even the scary numbers they cite are manufactured. The campaigns warn the bill would wipe out $80 billion in rewards a year, but that figure traces to a study the banks’ own coalition paid for. 

Then a newsletter passes it along as if a trusted travel expert came up with it. And that’s how a lobby’s talking point gets laundered into fact.

The dirty secret about your credit card

The American credit card is a clunky, expensive way to move money. Every swipe crawls through a chain of middlemen, the issuing bank, the acquiring bank, the network, the processor, each one taking a cut. That’s why America’s fees are among the highest on earth.

It doesn’t have to work this way. Brazil built an instant payment system called Pix, run by its central bank. It charges merchants about 0.33 percent per transaction, according to International Monetary Fund figures, compared with 2.34 percent for a credit card. A street vendor selling coconuts on a beach in Recife pays less to accept a digital payment than a Walmart in Ohio pays Visa. 

Pix now handles more transactions in Brazil than Visa and Mastercard combined. 

In the United States, we’re stuck with the expensive version because the companies profiting from it spend $200 million to keep it that way. Then they kick back a small percentage to you as a reward to keep you compliant. 

The CCCA won’t build us a Pix. But it’s a first and necessary crack in the Visa-Mastercard duopoly. 

Nobody’s promising you a refund

The merchants pushing this bill have their own numbers, and they’re worth a look. They claim swipe fees have jumped 80 percent since the pandemic and have driven prices up by more than $1,200 a year for the average family.

In fairness, it’s not entirely clear if lowering swipe fees would bring down costs. The Congressional Research Service studied a 2010 law that capped debit swipe fees and found it “indeterminate” whether prices dropped for shoppers. 

But one thing is certain: This summer’s rewards panic collapses under its own numbers. Americans earned $47 billion worth of credit card rewards in 2024, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That same year, merchants paid $187 billion in swipe fees on credit cards. Your “free” flight is a partial rebate on a tax the banks set, collect and keep raising. They take three dollars and hand you back one. Then a website tells you to guard that dollar with your life and ignore the other two.

Read this before you sign the petition

So before you fill out one of those forms, understand what you’re doing. You’re protecting a fee you can’t see, sold to you by a marketer you mistook for a journalist, on behalf of the banks that will never stop charging you. Your “free” flight to Cancun was never at risk.

The banks spent $200 million on this fight, and now they’re asking you to work for free to promote a cause that could hurt you. Don’t be fooled.