Have You Already Lost?

[Joanne98]

posted by Elizabeth Warren

The reasons to dispute a credit charge are many--mistakes, failure to credit a return, identity theft, a lost payment that triggered penalty interest and fees, etc. Maybe the company will be nice and settle, or maybe the charge will be small an the customer will grumble and pay. But if you had a serious dispute you wanted to pursue, have you already lost?

Business Week has a cover story this week about credit card disputes are settled through arbitration. The focus is on NAF, an arbitration outfit that, by its own accounting, arbitrated 18,075 cases between a business entity and a California consumer. The score? Business won 18,045, and consumers won 30. Continued>>>

http://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2008/06/have-you-alread.html#more

[hfojvt]

1. that seems kinda arbitrary - the customer is (almost) always wrong

but I have not been very impressed with most of the judges I have seen in court either.

[Sinistrous]

2. Not necessarily arbitrary.

As someone connected to a small retail business, I have responded to many of these disputed charges. All I did was fax a copy of the charge receipt to the credit card clearing house, and they did the rest. We never "lost" one of them. My guess is that spouse A made the purchase, did not tell spouse B who reviewed the credit card bill and wondered WTF is this charge to this firm with the funny name. Spouse B then called the credit card folks and disputed the charge.

[hfojvt]

3. a dispute like that should never goto arbitration though

as a customer service person, I would probably straighten that out before it even went to dispute. I used to get calls with "WTF is that charge for?" and then ask a few questions and often they would remember what it was about.