I’m almost never accused of being too neutral, but when I covered a type of foreign currency exchange that affects international travelers recently, that’s exactly what happened.
I was writing about a little trick called a dynamic currency conversion (DCC), which works something like this: If you’re paying by credit card overseas, a merchant will sometimes ask if you want to make the purchase in dollars, “for your convenience.” If you agree, your money is converted from the native currency into greenbacks and sent to your credit card, but at an awful exchange rate. Bizarrely, you may still have to pay your credit card a fee for a foreign transaction — so you basically convert the money twice.
Read more “Is this “convenience” just another scam?”
