Personal Finance

EU-based ATMs tend to charge a fee of ~€4—6 on non-EU cards. I’m fine with that because my bank rebates those fees anyway. However something seems off with some French ATMs.

France has a reputation for having the highest banking fees in Europe and their ATMs seem consistent with that reputation. Some French ATMs charge €6 and that gets printed on the ATM receipt. As expected my bank sees the fee on their side in that case and they credit it back to me -- so no problem there. But then other ATMs in France do not print any fee on the receipt. Consequently my bank sees no fee on the transaction so they rebate nothing back to me. Are those ATMs reeaaally giving up the opportunity to charge a fee to non-EU cards? Certainly no Dutch ATMs ever pass up that opportunity. When calculating the xe.com rate of that day and comparing to the money drawn from my bank account, there is a discrepancy of ~$5.50 USD.

So it looks like the ATM is adding their fee into the euro amount. E.g. I pull out €400 & decline DCC, and the ATM prints a receipt showing €400 but then draws something like €405. In principle it should be evident from the bank statement. But my bank lacks transparency and omits from the statement the euro amount and also withholds the exchange rate they applied (which the contract says is the straight interbank rate with 0% markup).

I see two possible theories here:

1. my bank’s so called fee-free FX rate is really ~1%; OR
2. the French ATMs add the fee to the amount charged and hiding the fee. They do not benefit from it but could be sloppy programming. Maybe they think it does not matter because they are still charging whatever the customer agrees to anyway.

While I struggle to believe that 3 different French ATMs would pass up the chance to take a fee, I ran the numbers on a transaction that actually does transparently take a fee and result in a rebate. I still paid almost 1% more than the xe.com rate.

All fees must be disclosed on the ATM screen by law. But my memory is not so reliable.

If you need to pay someone in the US, it’s interesting that you can walk into the bank used by the recipient and make a deposit into their account. You just need to know their account number and IIRC that even works with cash. There is generally no fee. Sometimes tenants and landlords have that arrangement.

Anyone know if that’s possible in Europe? Does it depend on the bank? I know the conventional way in Europe is to bring cash into the post office, and the post office will take the cash and transfer the money to the recipient. But there is a transaction fee and I think a restriction as well that the payer must be a resident. Can a payer go direct to the recipient’s bank and get service, ideally without a fee?

The trend in western Europe is banks are pulling out of the ATM business and joining consortiums. Then those consortiums deploy much fewer ATMs than the banks had. And they monopolise. If one or two ATM brands reject your card, you may be fucked if it’s a small city, as I recently experienced.

ATM alternatives are becoming increasingly essential due to ATM enshitification & sparcity. Some shops give cash back, where you have more money pulled from your bank and the cashier gives you cash from the register. The US has always been on-the-ball with cash back, even though the ATMs in the US are not the shit-show that we see in Europe lately.

So it’s easy to find cash back options in the US because there are several compiled lists showing various stores and limits, like this. Some shops have a fee and some not and the range of limits vary wildly. But at least there are published options.

I’m struggling to find information like that in Europe. In part this is because “cash back” is an overloaded term that also means rebate deals (like discounts of ~1—5%), so search results are polluted. It’s bizarre there is so little info about this. So many people have become cashless that hardly anyone even notices the shit show that ATMs have become. Hence low demand for info on cash back options.

Cash back can be interesting for foreign card holders in Europe because they avoid ATM fees. Discovercard/Diner’s Club seems to guarantee no cash back fee and at the same time no currency exchange markup. But the data on cashback in Europe is sparse and inconsistent from one country to the next.

• Norway shops offering cash back refuse non-Norwegian cards.
• UK stores require no purchase and have no fee, but they also discriminate against non-local bank cards. Interesting that in the UK you can ask for any odd denomination including coins (unlike with ATMs and perhaps unlike cashback in other regions).
• Denmark: local cards only, credit cards refused.
• Spain: no cash back service (but that article is 10 yrs old).
• Netherlands: rumour is that Albert Heijn, SPAR, and Smullers have cash back. (SPAR advertises cashback on their UK site with a locator because apparently only some locations offer it. Yet they wholly conceal this option from their Dutch website)
• Belgium: Aldi has it. But if you boycott Israel then you boycott Aldi North (all Belgian Aldis are Aldi North)

Mastercard has a “cashback store locator” on their US website. And apparently that db is only populated with US stores. Which is a bit shitty because MC is global and they should have that information.

I’m not getting why shops are non-transparent about this. Presumably they offer cash back potentially fee-free because they profit from whatever you’re buying. It would work on me.. if I have some confidence that I can get €200 cash back at a store, that store is sure to get my business. They also benefit from a security standpoint as there is less cash in the tills at the end of the day.

Anyway, please feel free to use this thread to crowdsource cashback info.

ATMs very rarely inform users before they put their card in the slot whether it’s the kind of machine that uses a motor to suck your card into the machine. If yes, then avoiding the machine is a good idea.

The question is, how do you find out in advance whether the machine has a motor? Obviously if you test it on your actual valid bank card that you intend to use for the transaction, you may not get it back.

So my first thought was carry expired old bank cards which can be sacrificed. Stick the card in and if a motor pulls it in, hit the cancel button and try it on the next ATM until you find an ATM that does not suck the card in. This still has issues. The machine can vary well confiscate the card merely on the basis of being expired (thus invalid). Sure, it’s a sacrificial card but I don’t have 100+ such cards to spare. And also those dead cards will have my name on them and the ATM network could blackball my name.

So my next thought is to cut a rectangle from a plastic food container to use as a dummy card. It’s still dicey because criminals are deliberately sticking thin plastic sheets into card slots to cause the next real inserted card to get jammed (this is in fact one of many reasons why legit users should avoid the motorised card slots in the first place). But if you cause things to jam up, you could get treated like a criminal (camera → facial recognition.. etc).

Maybe loyalty cards.. grab a stack of loyalty cards from a grocery store and use those as dummy cards. Better ideas?

The bank requires customers who use their phone app to:

1. buy a new recent smartphone, repeatedly (because the bank’s app detects when it is running on an Android emulator and denies service)
2. subscribe to mobile phone service (which also costs money and also in some regions requires supplying national ID to the mobile carrier to copy for their records which customers then must trust them to secure)
3. share their mobile phone number with a power abusing surveillance capitalist who promotes the oil industry (Google / Totaal)
4. create a Google account and agree to their terms (which includes not sharing software that was fetched from the Playstore jail)
5. share their IMEI# with Google
6. share all their app versions with Google, thus keeping Google informed of known vulns for which they are vulnerable
7. share with Google where they bank and trust Google not to sell that info to debt collectors
8. install proprietary non-free software and trust the security of non-reviewable code
9. share the mobile phone number with the bank

Why are so many people okay with this?

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/6494438

I pulled money out of the wall in France and rejected DCC to ensure my bank does the conversion. The ATM had a dysfunctional receipt printer, and (unlike other ATMs) the ATM was not smart enough to mention the broken printer before the withdrawal.

Then the bank statement in the US only showed the USD amount, not the euros. Seems a bit off because I think when ATMs do a conversion they are obligated to show both currencies and the conversion rate. Why would the same transparency not be required when banks do the conversion? IIUC, the law seems to be here:

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-12/chapter-II/subchapter-A/part-205/section-205.9

And indeed I see no mention of foreign currency in the disclosure requirements.

#askFedi #lawFedi

cross-posted from: https://links.hackliberty.org/post/125466

My credit card issuer apparently never gets to know what I purchased at stores, cafes, & restaurants -- and rightfully so. The statement just shows the shop name, location, and amount.

Exceptionally, if I purchase airfare the bank statement discloses:

• airline who sold the ticket
• carrier
• passenger name
• ticket number
• city pairs

So that’s a disturbing over-share. In some cases the airline is a European flag carrier, so IIUC the GDPR applies, correct? Doesn’t this violate the data minimization principle?

Airlines no longer accept cash, which is also quite disturbing (and illegal in jurisdictions where legal tender must be accepted when presented for PoS transactions).

Has anyone switched to using a travel agent just to be able to pay cash for airfare?

UPDATE

A relatively convincing theory has been suggested in this other cross-posted community:

https://links.hackliberty.org/comment/414338

Apparently it’s because credit cards offer travel insurance & airlines have incentive to have another insurer involved. Would be useful if this were documented somewhere in a less refutable form.

The #warOnCash inspires a search for a bank that issues Discovercard (or Diner’s Club) debit cards. The reason:

• Visa & Mastercard are members of the Better Than Cash Alliance & aggressively fighting the anti-side of the war on cash.
• American Express is an ALEC member (thus supports right-wing politicians).

Obviously it makes sense to use cash whenever possible. But in those situations where cash is impossible, I would favor Discovercard because it’s the lesser of evils. The problem is Discovercard is like #AmEx: they both control the payment network AND have customer details. Too much info in one place for data leeches. I prefer separation. There used to be several 3rd-party Discover debit cards, but AFAIK they’re all gone. These are the old options:

• (Maryland) https://www.oldlinebank.com/personal/overview/
• (Florida) https://cadencebank.com/personal/personal-debit-cards <= no mention of "Discover debit", but this page confirms: https://www.discoverdebit.com/article/cadence-case-study
• (Kentucky, but available nationwide) cfsbky.com ← looks like mastercard now?
• (Texas) https://www.thebankandtrust.com/personal/discover-consumer-card/ ← tor-hostile
• (PA) https://www.jbt.bank/personal-banking/discover-debit-card/ ← tor-hostile
• (WI) https://www.guardiancu.org/personal-banking/checking-accounts/debit-cards/ ← tor-hostile
• (IL, but available nationwide) https://www.oldsecond.com/personal-banking/card-services/ <= said Discover Debit no longer offered but that they have a Discover CC (yet I don't find it online)

If the bank has become tor-hostile i don’t even check. Anyway, if anyone knows of any banks or credit unions offering Discover debit cards please reply.

Discovercard has quite low acceptance outside the US, but it’s interesting because it offers the straight interbank forex rate. So in principle it’d be interesting to use in non-USD regions.

The problem is the low acceptance among merchants. So it would theoretically be interesting to use the cash advance mechanism. One can deliberately overpay their bill so there is a credit which avoids the interest charges. Of course a problem remains: the extortionate 10% cash advance fee.

Credit cards sometimes cancel the cash advance fee as a promo. I don’t think I’ve ever seen discovercard do that.

Has anyone tried to negotiate to have the cash advance fee removed? I think some banks are willing to negotiate that in advance.