Hi, i'm from Taiwan and i just recently uploaded some funds after verifying etc... onto skrill.
I will be doing all the conversions to USD so everything is clear.
I went to my bank deposited 4000TWD(133.77USD). My bank took 59TWD(2USD) and that was it. Once the money it my moneybookers account it was only showing 2557.19TWD(85.24USD). 133.77-85.24=48.53usd missing which is roughly in gorilla math about 33% that has gone missing. Anyone have this situation before?

my 2nd scenario, I made a trade for 10000TWD(333.33USD) and had it transferred to my account. The full amount made it to my account. I played a lil poker etc... decided to withdraw the 10000TWD(333.33USD)to my bank. skrill charged me a 66.55(~2USD) processing fee. After the money hit my bank there was only 8700TWD(290USD).
333.33-290=43.33USD that went missing again. which is roughly about 13% of my withdrawal? can anyone enlighten me on this situation? skrill is one of the only ways to deposit onto stars from Taiwan, so this is a definite need help emergency... otherwise i might need to relocate once again... sigh

Thank you for your time and help!

I'm actually still in the US, but i plan to relocate back to Taiwan. These transactions are real. My fiancee is residing there and she set everything up, we did it as a mock run to see what kind of problems we would encounter. And this seems to be a very serious one. Thank you guys again.

Did you email Skrill to look into it? Even if you get charged currency exchange rate fees twice, it would still not add up that much ... most likely intermediary bank fees I'd say.

No doubt this is it.

OP: Check with your Taiwanese bank if you can open a USD account. I see no other way getting around being royally f'ed due to fx and intermediary bank fees using the options available to you from Taiwan.

Unfortunately, its definitely intermediary banks "stealing" your money. The bad news is that there is **** all you can do about it. As long as you deal with wire transfers, every intermediary bank will charge you a fee and as you can imagine that adds up quite fast if it passes through even a handful of banks.

Thx for the responses. I'm pretty sure that is what it is, talking to a skrill rep on another forum.

hey vanity, any luck on finding a solution for skrills?

I'm trying to deposit into PS, i'm in Taiwan now.

Would appreciate any advice man, thanks!

Taiwan Skrill user also. I've gotten ****ed by this intermediary bull**** too.

Would a USD account really fix the problem?

It should, if the fees are as I understand them. I'll explain how I understand it and how it works with me in my Canada bank/USD situation.

Banks charge conversion fees. So if you have Stars USD and you want to eventually get the money to your Bank of America account in USD, you have a couple options.

1. Cashout via Stars to your Canada acct ($CAD), the bank is going to charge you a fee because they received USD from Stars, so they charge you whatever their conversion rate is. Then you will wire from your Canada $CAD account to BofA $USD account. You get hit with more conversion fees here too.

2. Sell on 2p2 for .97 or something. This is clearly a better option if you don't have a USD bank acct in whatever country you're in.

3. Cashout via Stars to your Canada account ($USD), you don't get conversion fees. You will always get a bank wire fee, you get this in option 1 as well, but that is a fee for a wire...has nothing to do with conversion.

NOTE: When I opened my USD account in Canada the minimum deposit was $9,500 USD to open the acct...and it's usually going to be fairly large in comparison to what you're used to as a minimum opening deposit. They aren't gonna let you open a USD account in Canada with $100 in it.

Just think of $CAD as apples and $USD as oranges. If you send oranges from Stars to Canada, they automatically change them to apples and charge a fee. Then you send the apples to America and they automatically change them back to oranges so you get another fee. If the Canada account is in oranges then you're gonna have oranges the entire time...you'll never get conversion fees.

Option 2 is going to be better than option 3 up to a certain amount. You're selling at .97 instead of 1.00 but you're avoiding wire fees (unless the person you're selling to is doing a wire). So if you're selling $1,000 and you're getting a $970 bank of america xfer you're only paying $30. If you cashout $1,000 from Stars to your Canada account you're gonna have to probably pay a wire fee in the area of $25ish, then probably an outgoing wire fee from your Canada bank and a incoming wire fee at BofA which will total anywhere from $50-$85 between the 3 fees...higher than $30 almost always. But if you are cashing out 50k the $85 in fees is still much smaller than selling at .97.

I'm probably missing something here, but why not get the Skrill Mastercard and just withdraw using an ATM? That's what I do here in the Czech Republic. Granted I can also send the money to my bank and not lose much in the transaction other than the fee and a small conversion rate loss, so, like I said, I'm probably missing something in OP's situation.

Cool, thanks for the explanation. I guess I'll have to look into USD denominated accounts here in Taiwan. I'm sure they're available, just gotta see what the conditions are. And what's this selling on 2p2, how does that work?


I was intrigued so I just looked into it. There's a yearly 10euro fee, ok not a big deal I guess. But they charge a "Fixed 2.49% foreign exchange rate", that seems a bit steep. And this is probably on-top of an already ****ty rate to begin with.

So if I wanted to withdraw $3000usd, I would get hit with a minimum $75 fee.

Also this is a prepaid card. So everytime I receive money in my Skrill account and want to make a withdraw, they would need to send me a new card? Seems rather inconvenient.

The Fees aren't great, for sure, but they are better, I believe than what was in the OP. As far as prepaid, that just means that you have to have money in your account to withdraw it (so money from poker, for instance), rather than a true credit card where you can receive money as credit and then pay it back later. You get one card and use it over and over like any other card. You can also join the Skrill club and get some of the fees returned as a sort of Skrill rakeback.