Credit cards

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority published today the credit card lending survey results for the fourth quarter of 2020.

Australia allows merchants to charge to customers reimbursement of the charges it pays to payment card companies. It is not permitted that surcharges are applied. A car rental company has been ordered to pay AUD350,000 in penalties for overcharging. Are airlines, including foreign operators, next in line?

If a little shop told its customers that they could have a special offer that cost x, then denied them when they arrived, then told them the price was actually 15% more than x, then when the bill arrived it was for a further 20%, credit card companies would be deluged with complaints and chargebacks. But that is exactly what Microsoft's Skype does, as Nigel Morris-Cotterill demonstrates.

There is something off here: you can use your credit card to buy pornography of the most awful and depraved kinds ,you can use your credit card to place illegal wagers or take part in illegal gambling, you can use your credit card to buy drugs, legal and illegal from illegal or at least dubious sources or to put money at risk in pump and dump schemes and the banks and credit card companies are adamant that they cannot identify and prevent such transactions. And yet, when their own business models are under threat, suddenly they are able to identify and prevent the purchase of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple plus many, many more.

In her special brand of contorted English, California's District Attorney Kamala Harris, says that a website is "an online brothel" and she's determined to jail its operators. Amongst the allegations is money laundering, at least in part based on the fact that the website's owners set up other companies to front their sales so that banks, etc. would allow them to take credit card payments. But Harris is off-target. She should be looking at cloud services providers. Cloudflare is in her back-yard. That would be a good place to start.

As a result of concerns raised by ASIC, American Express Australia Limited has agreed to change its approach to the charging of a higher ‘default’ rate of interest to credit card customers who have defaulted in their payment obligations. The policy currently affects 7.9% of credit card accounts issued by AMEX. As a result of the changes the holders of those accounts will receive a reduction in interest rate of up to 6%.