Whine Wednesday: New FlatPay Payment Scam In Finland

We have covered various Dynamic Currency Conversion (DCC) cases numerous times over the past decade, from ATMs to payment terminals.

You are often presented the “option” to pay with the currency of the country where you are, OR the currency of the country where the credit card is issued, with a variable “convenience” fee of anywhere between 3% and 16% based on my own experiences (see the image above).

This is the usual scenario. You are presented with the payment terminal and the option to choose between the currency of the card (USD) or the country where you are (BRL).

The fee for this “convenience” is clearly disclosed, and it is 16%, which is ridiculously high, and I obviously declined.

Well. Then there is a new scam by FlatPay that I have never previously encountered, and of all the places, in my birth country of Finland.

I visited the market square on a sunny May weekend morning and decided to have a coffee and an item from one of the few “huts” in the square.

I was then presented with a terminal that displayed text in Finnish, showing the total amount with an undisclosed fee included due to the type of card I was using (personal, not business).

Sale

€11.94

You are paying with a corporate card and/or a card from outside the EU, so an additional fee will be added to the payment transaction.

Do you want to continue?

Confirm

There is no option to cancel, and the notice is in Finnish, a language that probably 99.99% of these scam victims do not understand.

If you proceed, you are then presented with a receipt that shows the extra amount, which is 3.82%.

The fee was not disclosed at any previous step, and there were no visible signs indicating that a fee would be added for non-consumer or non-EU/EEA cards.

Merchants can charge a fee for using business cards in Europe, but I don’t believe that this is the case with consumer cards, and the disclosure here was certainly not done correctly.

Conclusion

You must be very careful with these various payment terminals to ensure that charges are processed correctly. Even then, I tend to choose an incorrect currency or fail to correct it at least once a year, and the last time it cost me $50.

This FlatPay scam is the first time I have been charged an extra for using a credit card in Europe.

These fees are prevalent in Australia and New Zealand, but they are clearly disclosed before the transaction takes place, unlike in the case of this market square purchase in Finland.

I obviously chose another hut the following morning, and there were no extra fees.

Have you ever been charged a fee for using a credit card in Europe? If so, when and where? Please comment below.

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