Monzo continue to claim that PayPal have done nothing wrong. They have just sent me a response to “my complaint” (I never raised a complaint) that says:
I can see that the information you have been provided by our specialists is correct - you would need to take this up with PayPal as the information they have provided you with is correct as if this payment was set up as a re-occuring payment from their side then you wouldn’t have the choice to pick the currency when the payment comes out
They’ve then immediately contradicted their “there’s nothing you can do, you need to take this up with PayPal” stance in the next paragraph and said:
while the merchant has indicated that you add the PayPal account, this is an error with them as they did not give you the option here to opt out of DCC and you would need to raise a chargeback through us as per the message sent to you on February 28th
I don’t think the merchant has done anything wrong here. They used PayPal’s API to bill me in USD. That is exactly what I wanted. PayPal are the ones responsible for the DCC and for pocketing the additional cash used by charging me their marked up rate.
How to: Disable PayPal's Dynamic Currency Conversion » Travel-Dealz suggests it is possible to somehow opt out after the automatic payment agreement is set up (again, I’m not convinced having to opt out after the fact/having automatic DCC without consent by default complies with article 59 (2) PSD2), but when I tried to go in and edit the funding source I just got this message
