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The Fair Credit Billing Act |
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The Fair Credit Billing Act delineates guidelines for disputing what you believe to be an error on your credit card statement. The Fair Credit Billing Act only applies to accounts considered to be open-end accounts such as your credit card accounts and charge accounts issued by department stores. The Act does not apply to installment loans.
The Fair Credit Billing Act provides a way for you to dispute a number of situations that can show up on your account statements including charges that appear for goods and/or services you never received, goods that were damaged at the time of receipt, errors that appear in the amount you should have been charged or the date the charges should have been posted, and credits you are entitled to but that have not yet shown up.
The Fair Credit Billing Act can also protect you if your account statement was mailed to an incorrect address, provided you properly notified the issuer within the time period outlined in the Act. You even have the right to question any charge appearing on your statement that you do not recognize. When you take this type of action, the issuer must gather documentation about the charge and then present it to you. If the issuer fails to take these steps, you will not be responsible for paying the amount in question.
Should any of these types of errors show up on one of your open-end account statements, the Fair Credit Billing Act requires you to provide written notification of such error to the “billing inquiries” address listed on the corresponding statement. The written account of the error must arrive within 60 days of the date that the issuer mailed the statement to you, regardless of the date you received the statement.
You won’t have any protection under the Fair Credit Billing Act if you notify the issuer any way other than written notification sent via the mail (US Postal Service). Once the issuer receives your written dispute, it must follow the resolution guidelines and schedules that also make up the Fair Credit Billing Act. Failure to do so can result in penalties.
The Fair Credit Billing Act also defines what information an issuer can and cannot forward to the credit reporting bureaus. This section of the Fair Credit Billing Act is very powerful because it can protect against having negative or derogatory information appear on your credit report.
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Credit Card Definitions > F - M > Fair Credit Billing Act
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