Dispute (online credit card charges) at your peril

[Gormy Cuss]

Dispute charges at your peril
by David Lazarus, San Francisco Chronicle
Wednesday, June 14, 2006

If you've ever reversed the charge for a dubious credit card transaction or online purchase, your name could be on a secretive overseas database that consumer advocates say may violate protections guaranteed under U.S. law.

The database is maintained by a Panama company named Goldwell Corp., which runs an online service called ChargeBack Bureau (chargebackbureau.org). Chargebacks are a right provided to U.S. consumers under the Fair Credit Billing Act. The system allows people to reverse credit card payments for goods or services that were unauthorized or end up being different than advertised....

"You order a red couch, you get a blue couch; you order a working dishwasher, you get a broken dishwasher," said Gail Hillebrand, staff attorney at Consumers Union in San Francisco. "Those are common reasons for chargebacks."

"The chargeback is a very important consumer right," she said. "It makes the Internet safer. If you don't get what you ordered, you can undo it."
...
The database is also for "sales that ended up in a refund due to disagreement with the customer." This would normally suggest, because a refund has been granted, that the customer was in the right. ChargeBack Bureau describes such people as "bad customers."
....
"They are threatening and penalizing people who are using their rights under federal law to challenge improper credit card purchases," he said. "Blacklisting consumers with no due process is completely illegitimate. It's outrageous."

Lovely, isn't it? By locating the database offshore they are beyond the reach of U. S. consumer protection laws.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/06/14/BUG3KJDKLC1.DTL
©2006 San Francisco Chronicle

[xchrom]

1. the corporate branch of government is in good working order.