epassporte fine print (now its drama,something to look for)
I was reviewing my credit card statement and noticed a $10 cash advance fee.
I use epassport to wire money to my developers, using my credit card to load epassport, been doing this for a few years.
epassporte takes out their fee and i transfer the money and all is good.
I call up my credit card company, and ask them what is this cash advance fee, i haven't used my CC to get cash out.
They said that the epassporte charge was a cash advance. I was like, what?
So i called epassporte. The operator told me that they use an off-shore bank, and run the charges as if it were a cash advance.
I asked her where it says this on the site, since i don't recall this happening before.
She pointed to the page where you add funds (put in your CC card), and it says (in bold):
"* Please Note : Your bank may assess a cash advance fee."
I probably saw that when i loaded the card, but didn't think anything of it.
So now seeing that this has occurred last month when i loaded up my epassporte account, i saw another Cash Advance Fee.
So the fine point here, is that they are using an off-shore bank that is costing me in the end, more money to transfer money, then if I used another form of payment (like western union, paypal,etc).
So as a cash advance fee, this charge is now being hit with a high interest rate as a cash advance, which means even more that I am being billed.
And so checking back with my credit card company, he informed me that since this was a cash advance fee, that any payments i apply to my card (and i do have a balance), goes towards the other purchases first. So in other words, i can't get rid of this "cash advance" high interest fees unless i pay off my credit card.
Even if i deduct the cost of this cash advance fee to my developers, it appears I am being hit with finance charges by my CC because they consider this to be a cash advance. (using my debt card is not the answer to this situation).
Just wanted to know if others are seeing this same thing as well. As we know from automatic rebills for paysite subscriptions, people don;t always check their statements and things fly by.. i admit to being just as guilty of doing that for not catching this earlier.
This may have other implications for the epassport visa card, and so on.
iBill's gKard had similar issues. Do other competitors to epassporte have same issues (ie myVirtual Card, etc?) of coding their transaction as a cash advance?
Fight the things that make you go hmmmm...
|