4 ms·

They hit you with 'Chargeback fraud'. They can cancel your card, put it on your credit history redcord and can choose to press charges.

logfromblammo 9y ago
Has this actually happened to you or any of your acquaintances? The retail-dispute resolution clauses of most credit agreements are very biased towards the consumer. If you can document that you made at least one good-faith effort at resolving the issue yourself before requesting that the credit issuer handle it for you, then the retailer has to overcome the presumption that the customer is always right in the arbitration. As it's all about the money and private agreements, it is always possible that someone who has more of it than you could use it to buy a more favorable outcome. But it is also very unlikely that anyone would ever see a criminal indictment over credit fraud before the damages exceed thousands of dollars. No credit company wants to lose customers because they got a reputation for grassing on their customers, but they would want to discourage their petty frauds--they know they have some, with statistical certainty--from growing worse by occasionally prosecuting the worst of the grand frauds. If HSBC can knowingly launder drug money, and Wells Fargo can knowingly open fake accounts, a credit bank can knowingly screw the retailer when one of their credit customers does a bogus chargeback just because the cashier was rude at the checkout. I won't say bogus chargebacks are not a problem, but there is a threshold below which it does not negatively affect the revenue of the bank, so no one there will be paid to care about it. A computer program might evaluate it. It might get randomly selected for human auditing. And most people are mostly honest, so the fraud rate would still be low, even if no one policed it more than a token amount. The credit banks's mission isn't to catch the frauds; it's to make money. So they catch just the right amount of frauds in order to make the most money.

logfromblammo 9y ago

Has this actually happened to you or any of your acquaintances? The retail-dispute resolution clauses of most credit agreements are very biased towards the consumer. If you can document that you made at least one good-faith effort at resolving the issue yourself before requesting that the credit issuer handle it for you, then the retailer has to overcome the presumption that the customer is always right in the arbitration. As it's all about the money and private agreements, it is always possible that someone who has more of it than you could use it to buy a more favorable outcome. But it is also very unlikely that anyone would ever see a criminal indictment over credit fraud before the damages exceed thousands of dollars. No credit company wants to lose customers because they got a reputation for grassing on their customers, but they would want to discourage their petty frauds--they know they have some, with statistical certainty--from growing worse by occasionally prosecuting the worst of the grand frauds. If HSBC can knowingly launder drug money, and Wells Fargo can knowingly open fake accounts, a credit bank can knowingly screw the retailer when one of their credit customers does a bogus chargeback just because the cashier was rude at the checkout. I won't say bogus chargebacks are not a problem, but there is a threshold below which it does not negatively affect the revenue of the bank, so no one there will be paid to care about it. A computer program might evaluate it. It might get randomly selected for human auditing. And most people are mostly honest, so the fraud rate would still be low, even if no one policed it more than a token amount. The credit banks's mission isn't to catch the frauds; it's to make money. So they catch just the right amount of frauds in order to make the most money.