My husband and I both received this mailing yesterday. I do have records for at least 4 trips whereas he has none. I'll have to look at more closely to see if the extra effort is worth it.

Yes, I got the packet too, and yes I will be going for the 25 dollar refund, too much work to figure out all the other

Well thanks for all the feedback. I've already requested statements from my CC bank, so if/when I get them adding up the foreign transactions won't be too much trouble if I can recoup several hundred dollars.

We also received the notice and filed it in the round file, until I noticed this topic.

The problem is that the banks, including Bank of America, are still charging excessive ATM and foreign exchange fees.

I received the mailing yesterday, I was going to check at it online, but glad that you all received it. It is too much a hassel for me to calculate the expenses over the past 10 year, I may just do the $25. What if I threw the mail in a trash can?

A massive mailing from "IRS" earlier this year, however, was a scam.

I too received this yesterday. Unfortunately we shredded all of our 2006 and prior CC statements this past summer... we definitely probably spent $20,000 or more overseas during that time period but don't have definitive proof.

Does anyone know if most CC companies charge a fee to send you all your old statements?

Also, we were using cards that only charged the 1% fee (not the 2-3% mark-up charged by MBNA, Bank or America, Chase, etc). Does this settlement cover both fees, just the 1%, just the 2-3% mark-up, ???

I got all the ones I needed from Citibank for free.

Why didn't I get one of those packets? I have PAYED THOUSANDS in foreign transaction fees in that time period.

The Great and Powerful Thingorjus

Thanks NeoPatrick. I was hoping you would see my questions because you always have precise answers :-)

I believe most of our fees were probably on MBNA cards, now owned by Bank of America. I guess I get to call them too and request statements.

It's a good thing I have until May to send everything in - this is going to take some time!

I use capital one when travelling. . no fees and best conversion rate for the day for transactions.

AMEX corporate also does no fees.

Yeah, I got one too. Looks legit- it doesn't ask for any personal info at all for the first two options. It's interesting that on the CC statement I got after returning from Ireland this year the "foreign transaction fee" is now itemized for each transaction. I never noticed that before.

It became law in April 2006 that the foreign trans fees had to be displayed separately on the statements, and detailed in the disclosures.

According to the on-line form, your bank is required to send you all of the CC information you request, but first you have to list the credit card and the last 4 digits of your SS number associated with each credit card. Before I do that, I want to double check to see if everything is legitimate, even though it is worth a little more than a Starbuck's for last year alone.

I had not heard about this refund. We have taken many trips during this time period and use credit cards almost exclusively to pay for expenditures in Europe. Do you have to receive the information from the specific credit card issuer to qualify or is there a general site from which one can request reimbursement? Thanks for the information.

Take care,
Robyn France

You don't have to add up all your charges if you take Option #2. We added up all the days we'd been out of the country during the eligible dates, and my husband had 69 and I had 59, so that should get us quite a bit more than $25.

Option 3 is the only one that requires you to add up all your spending. Option 2 will give you the "typical" amount for the days you were out of the country.

We received our (three) letter yesterday from the U.S. District Court for three separate credit cards, but haven't had a chance to thoroughly read the contents (just skimmed through).

This suit and the verdict was covered by the press--there is nothing fraudulent about the mailing. The cc companies were charging a foreign transaction fee and not notifying patrons of it (all of this was well-explained in the posting by Paul Rabe). One's personal bias about whether lawyers should or shouldn't get a contingency based fee seems a completely separate issue. As a result of their efforts, however, all cc companies do now post the amount of the foreign transaction fee charged--and as pointed out by Paul Rabe, the cc companies were deceiving their customers to a mighty hefty tune.

If one has kept one's cc bills from each year, doing the third option only requires
going through them and taking the charges done overseas. Not particularly time-consuming or taxing unless one was travelling abroad every month or so. We did about two trips or one long trip just about every one of those ten years--tallying up the charges has taken about 20-30 minutes. No big deal.

I haven't heard anything about a lawsuit for us Visa customers so am jealous!

Yes, it is an obscenely huge fee that the law firms collect in a class action suit (when they win). But without the law suits would corporations contact us and say? "Oh, by the way, we cheated you for years and now that we have developed a corporate conscience we want to give you a small refund."
That will happen about the same time that the "Enrons" tell us that they manipulated the market to create an artificial energy shortage while the federal governement eliminated some price controls. We are getting a huge refund, right?
Until being exposed a few years ago the IRS did not advise taxpayers when they overpaid. You would only get a notice when you underpaid. This was not a class action lawsuit but exposure and pressure in a different form.

If we submitted our claim already (I did it this summer) do you have to resubmit? Anyone know? I haven't seen the new paperwork.

I got it too.
let's see, how shall I spend my $25.00 big ones?