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For many travelers, it’s intuitive to pack a credit card when you are getting your things together to leave home. Plastic is one form of currency that tends to not need conversion in foreign countries, and safeguards the far-from-home consumer in the unfortunate instances of theft or loss much better than carrying cash. That’s not to mention the accountability that merchants are required to face for dissatisfactory hotel rooms, tours, and rentals when they accept credit cards as a form of payment. And hey, if you spend enough money on your plastic your rewards program account might swell large enough to finance the next excursion. A credit card is a portable, easy, effective way to pay for your travels. But those who travel often are finding that all these perks carry an increasingly venomous bite, courtesy of the double-headed demon of foreign transaction fees and airline ticket convenience fees.

Credit card companies have been stealthily adding these fees to their customers’ bills for a while now, and we are only just now starting to catch on to the breadth of the scam they are running on the people of America. Let’s talk about foreign transaction penalties. These fees are sky-high: the average rate is two or three percent of the cost of your transaction when it takes place with a merchant located outside the United States (even in Canada!). Think about what I just told you. You can actually pay for the travel costs of your vacation right here in the U.S. using American dollars, and have hundreds of dollars tacked onto your bill for no logical reason whatsoever. This is not to be confused with a currency exchange fee. A foreign transaction penalty applying to purchases with international venders that are paid for in America is pure profit for your bank, since they do precisely nothing to earn it. It’s actually so bizarre and counterintuitive that most of us would never think to look for such a thing on our billing statements, and might have even paid such a fee without realizing how badly we had been scammed.

The interesting thing about these atrocious charges is that banks will often roll over on them when confronted. I’ve heard of several people managing to get obnoxious fees like foreign transaction fees reversed by simply calling their banks and telling them firmly that the fees are ridiculous and inexcusable. The fact that banks will actually deal with this by reversing the charges is all the proof I need to tell me that the financial institutions are fully aware of the inappropriateness of their charges too. With Congress aggressively pursuing reform measures against card companies for their predatory practices, I find it interesting to see that card companies would risk provoking their ire to a further extent than they already have. I predict that it will not be long before card issuers find themselves in more trouble and facing further restrictive legislation, since they cannot seem to keep themselves from being greedy.