Amazing how supple these normally inflexible finance firms can become when the government turns up the heat. After state lottery officials got involved, Mastercard suddenly rediscovered all sorts of powers and mechanisms at its disposal. “After hearing the concerns of cardholders,” Mastercard has decided to drop the $10 surcharge, and reclassify the lottery purchases as ‘government services’ instead of cash advances.
Hey, so long as Mastercard is rediscovering its hidden powers and demonstrated its capacity to respond to the ‘concerns of cardholders’, how about reclassifying the funding of one’s online gaming account as ‘entertainment’ instead of ‘punishable by 99 lashes’? No? Hell, it was worth a shot…