Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by konschubert 1713 days ago
Paypal is a pretty scammy service also on the consumer side.

When paying in foreign currency, they try to trick users into using their "conversion" service, which helpfully charges a bit more money to your credit card than you would have paid without their "assistance".

2 comments

A very common trap when using your credit card abroad too. If you don't insist on being charged in the local currency the payment processor may "convert" it for you with a worse rate and pocket the difference.
I wish there was some kind of regulation against this.
Totally agree. I feel scammed every time I have to change the currency during the payment process. Some time ago, I don't remeber when they changed it, you used to be able to opt-ou of currency exchange permanently per credit card. It was a very well hidden setting and I had to google the deep link every time to find it. Nowadays you have to explicitly disable it for each and every transaction.

I'm pretty sure though that most PayPal customers have no clue about this practice or just don't care.