[jonathanstrange]

Reminds me of the Kagi cheques I used to get via snail mail. Once I had a cheque of around 160 USD and got back less than half of it from my former bank, the Berliner Sparkasse. I went to the local branch and they kindly explained to me that every institution "in between" the "billing chain" for foreign cheques can siphon off an almost arbitrary transaction fee. I still think that was fraud.

Anyway, I opened an account at a US bank with branches in Germany and it cost me only the usual fee (which was still high, though). Nowadays I'm using Fastspring.