My wife called in last night to fight over a $20 service fee we had been charged for our account dropping too low (it hadn’t – our account minimum is calculated using savings and checking, not just checking…morons) and also noticed next to my $14.95 monthly gaming fee to EVE that there was a $2 or so “International Service Charge” attached to it. Round two on the phone started, and ended with Wachovia refusing to take that one off, claiming that they were withing their rights to charge us extra for having to exchange currencies, and that they were surprised it was so low – the lady claimed the charge should have been more like $7 a month, and would be so in the future.
Now, we’ve already established that Wachovia is capable of deploying morons – and actually, I’ve known that for some time because of other issues I’ve had. So I’m not entirely sure I have been told the gospel truth here, so I did some digging.
First of all, I found out that ISK doesn’t stand for Interstellar Space Kredit. It stands for “Iceland Krona” in the international banking scene. And that Wachovia charges a 3% international service fee for converting currency. So I did some quick math:
$14.95 x 1.03 = $15.40 -$14.95 = $.45 in service fees.
Nowhere near $2 or $7 either one.
Add to this my confusion over CCP itself. While they are originated in Iceland, they also have offices here in America, and so I’m not sure what kind of exchanging needs to go on at all. And in their FAQ page, while they list all sorts of additional charges that one might get hit with, one for converting currency is not on the list. And costs are listed not only in Euros, but also in USD, along with this sentence:
Prices are listed in Euros and US dollars. You can use the services of Yahoo Finance to convert the US dollar/Euros to your local currency.
Bold is mine. This would seem to indicate that CCP accepts two kinds of currency – Euros and US Dollars. So what is going on here? Well…I have two weeks until my sub is up. And I have at least one unpleasent conversation with Wachovia that will be taking place. I do have some options though.
At the very least I will be switching banks. I cannot tolerate incompetence and/or swindling. The economy is too bad to reward companies that fail in the most basic avenues of knowing their own policies and customer service. I may also switch my sub over to Discover, though I don’t know yet what their policies are either. Hopefully this will not mean EVE costing me $22 a month to play. I enjoy the game, but…
Anyone else out there ever have this problem?
Anyway, expect an extra post this week so I can regale you with the insanely underhanded way in which I won my first ever Twilight Imperium game. And no, I didn’t cheat…
Harbinger Zero 
I ran into the same issue with my bank, SunTrust. Back when the US dollar was stronger against the Euro, the conversion worked out in the banks favor, where they were making $1.75 on the conversion from US dollars to Euros. Last summer when the dollar began to drop against the Euro, things changed and when the bank started to loose money on the conversion, the price for EVE went up.
I currently pay $15.40 for my EVE subscription, not the listed 14.95, due to the currency conversion. The checking account product I have with my bank, Smart Checking, only charges me the actual US to Euro converted cost, no additional conversion fees. “Walk-All-Over-You” is a horrible bank. Try SunTrust if they are in your neck of the woods.
Apparently billing is handled by an international company, hence your bank charging you a foreign transaction fee as does my bank and most other banks out there. You won’t win that fight with Wachovia or by changing what credit card (Visa/MC) your billing your subscription to. Interestingly in this link (http://www.eve-search.com/thread/1158046/page/all) they say that debit or AmEx transactions don’t get charged that fee. You’ve enlightened me enough to perhaps change how I get billed for my subscriptions.
I read through the thread, and it does say that CCP charges in USD since I live in the USA, not in Euro’s, so no exchange should be needed or charged. That is where I will be starting with Wachovia.
I *will* get to the bottom of this, because its irritating me more the more I read about it.
It sounds very odd. I have not seen anything like this on EVE or any other game. But then, I use AmEx to pay for stuff on the internet because their fraud protection policy has been very good to me in the past. They seem to understand that I am paying to use their card, so they had best keep me happy!
So did this ever get resolved with Wachovia? Apologies if this gets covered in a later post, I am working my way to the present slowly…
(ARCHIVE BINGE WOO!)
Nope. And now I have a new bank. (-: Basically Wachovia has a clause that allows them to charge you an international fee for any business that has overseas operations – even if it in no way affects your purchase directly. I was clear with them when I left that this was one of the reasons I was taking everything I had away from their greedy little hands.