The Law Applied To Bank and Credit Card Charges
This law has recently been of great interest to UK bank and credit card customers who have been charged as much as £39 for a single transaction that took them over their credit limit. Consumers argued these charges were well beyond the cost of sending a computerised letter.
In 2007 the Office of Fair Trading investigated the excessively high charges being imposed on customers of credit card companies. In its report, the OFT confirmed these charges were unlawful under UK Law as they amounted to a penalty. It said it would be prepared to investigate any charge over £12, though this was not intended to indicate that £12 is a fair and acceptable charge. The OFT said it would be up to a court to determine such an amount based on the established legal precedent that the only recoverable cost would be actual costs incurred.
The credit card companies did not produce evidence of their actual costs to the OFT, instead insisting their charges are in line with clear policy and information provided to customers.
Following the ruling, many bank customers have made County Court claims against their banks and credit card companies for return of penalty charges for returned cheques, direct debits and unauthorized overdraft charges. To date no bank or credit card company, save NatWest on one occasion, has attended at Court for a Trial.
- OFT v Abbey
Read more about this topic: Liquidated Damages
Famous quotes containing the words law, applied, bank, credit, card and/or charges:
“You can no more bridle passions with logic than you can justify them in the law courts. Passions are facts and not dogmas.”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“Criticism is often not a science; it is a craft, requiring more good health than wit, more hard work than talent, more habit than native genius. In the hands of a man who has read widely but lacks judgment, applied to certain subjects it can corrupt both its readers and the writer himself.”
—Jean De La Bruyère (1645–1696)
“The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“The thief steals from himself. The swindler swindles himself. For the real price is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Mothers are not the nameless, faceless stereotypes who appear once a year on a greeting card with their virtues set to prose, but women who have been dealt a hand for life and play each card one at a time the best way they know how. No mother is all good or all bad, all laughing or all serious, all loving or all angry. Ambivalence rushes through their veins.”
—Erma Bombeck (20th century)
“I have never injured anybody with a mordant poem; my
verse contains charges against nobody. Ingenuous, I have
shunned wit steeped in venom—not a letter of mine is dipped
in poisonous jest.”
—Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)