Last week we told you about how New York state lottery players had discovered Mastercard was hitting them with a $10 fee plus daily interest on all Lotto or Mega Millions lottery subscriptions paid for by those handy dandy Mastercards. When the shit first hit the media fan, Mastercard did their best ‘it wasn’t me’ schtick, claiming that it’s those dastardly Mastercard-issuing banks who set the fees and rates. See? Not our problem. Can’t help you. Sorry. Buh-bye.
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…
