Thanks to new Federal Reserve regulations and the CARD Act of 2009, credit, debit, and ATM card users are now protected from a battery of abusive practices and outrageous fees. Well, everyone but business travelers, that is.

One area that both the regulations and the law ignored were fees imposed on transactions that banks and financial institutions consider "foreign" and transactions that require overseas currency exchanges.

Travel overseas and want to use your credit card? There's still a fee for that, and the price that financial institutions charge is skyrocketing. Want to use your debit card instead? There's a fee for that and prices are rising there too.

Want to use your ATM card overseas to withdraw cash from your own checking or savings account? Besides the fee the ATM owner may charge, your bank will charge you for the privilege of conducting business in a foreign currency. Want to avoid the fee by going to an overseas branch of your own bank? Sorry. Even if your financial institution operates overseas, it is likely to charge you to access your own money.

Think none of this affects you because you don't travel overseas? Think again. Financial institutions have redefined what a "foreign currency transaction" is. Even if you are being charged in U.S. dollars for a purchase you made in the United States, you may be hit with a currency fee if the merchant uses an overseas bank to process the transaction.

The new rules about fee disclosure now do require banks and financial institutions to highlight the topline cost of the overseas charges in bold-print disclaimers. But the details and the tricks of foreign exchange remain buried in the fine print. And there's big money in the small print.

The foreign-currency game was rampant when we discussed the issue three years ago. Things have gotten much more complicated (read: expensive) since then. In fact, more than 90 percent of bank cards and nearly 60 percent of credit union cards are now larded with currency fees, according to a report released last month by the Pew Trusts. The median fees? Three percent for bank cards and two percent for credit unions, Pew says.

That translates into a huge windfall for financial institutions and big bucks out of your pocket. Visa recently reported that international-transaction revenues rose 22 percent in a single quarter. MasterCard reported a 10.9 percent growth in transactions and an eye-popping 39 percent rise in cross-border fees.

And it is, almost literally, money for nothing. In an oft-cited lawsuit, Visa reported that its cost related to currency transactions was just $6.9 million on revenue of $630 million. Even when you consider the banks' all-purpose caveat—"You have to factor in the cost of fraud, which is much higher on international transactions," one credit-card executive told me last week—the profit margins are astounding. And neither the Fed nor the new credit-card laws offer business travelers any relief.

If you carry an American Express card, for example, you're probably paying a 2.7 percent vigorish whenever you use the card overseas. That translates to $27 ladled upon a hotel bill that converts to U.S. $1,000. The big banks—Chase, Citi, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, HSBC—charge even more, usually 3 percent whenever you whip out their MasterCard or Visa overseas.

Need local currency (and who doesn't) as you travel? Dipping your banking or debit card into a local ATM will usually carry the same 3 percent charge, plus any fee imposed by the owner of the ATM. And some banks, notably Citi, no longer differentiate between an overseas ATM run by someone else and Citi's own network. Walk into a Citi branch in Shanghai or London and use your Citicard to get cash from your Citi account and you'll pay 3 percent for the currency exchange fee too.