Bank of America Credit Card Complaint

Bank of America Credit card department,

Advertising and marketing Illinois

My Bank of America Travel Rewards ( Visa ) Card is advertised as having no foreign transaction fee. On - - - I made a purchase for - - and was charged - USD, which implies an exchange rate of approximately $1.00 per -. - discloses an - exchange rate on their website of - for - - -. - also discloses a - exchange rate of -. These rates are not inverses ( - - - = - ). The difference in these rates constitutes a spread - the profitable difference between the rates at which - buys and sells -. Supplement - to - - a ) ( Effective Date : -/-/- ) makes clear that a markup over a fair exchange rate is itself a foreign transaction fee : " The foreign transaction fee is determined by first calculating the dollar amount of the transaction by using a currency


the wholesale currency exchange markets, an average of the highest and lowest rates available in such markets, or a government-mandated or government-managed exchange rate ( or a rate selected from a range of such rates ). '' That Bank of America passes that charge on to me, the cardholder, also clearly makes it a foreign exchange fee : " Fees imposed by a third party are included only if they are directly passed on to the consumer. For example, if a credit card network imposes a 1 percent fee on the card issuer, but the card issuer absorbs the fee as a cost of doing business ( and only passes it on to consumers in the general sense that the interest and fees are imposed on all its customers to recover its costs ), then the fee is not a foreign transaction fee and need not be disclosed. In another example, if the credit card network imposes a 1 percent fee for a foreign transaction on the card issuer, and the card issuer imposes this same fee on the consumer who engaged in the foreign transaction, then the fee is a foreign transaction fee and a finance charge. '' The simplest test of whether a customer is charged a foreign transaction fee is if a purchase and a return on the same day ( and for the same amount of foreign currency ) leaves the customer worse off. Clearly this would be the case : a - - purchase followed immediately by a - return given the above spread of - between the - and - exchange rates would cost the customer about - dollars.