Fair Credit Billing Act - FCBA
Fair weather. Fair Isaac. Fair is wheel.
So...what's another Fair?
A U.S. federal law, put into effect in 1974, meant to provide protections against unfair billing practices, particularly by credit card companies. It includes rules against charging for items not received, or making mathematical errors in computing the bill.
(Which might not seem like landmark stuff, but regular people didn't start using credit cards regularly until fairly recently. Thus Congress not getting around to this law until the mid-1970s.)
The law also provides some other regulations related to credit card billing, such as a stipulation that bills must be sent at least 14 days before payment is due. The Federal Trade Commission was put in charge of enforcing the provisions of the act.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What is the Fair Credit Reporti...4 Views
Finance a la shmoop what is the Fair Credit Reporting Act? alright so think
old the Englande it's 1604 and your family is still working the barley [Family carrying barley]
fields because great-great-grandfather smeltwagon wasn't very good at rolling
the bones he lost a lot of money so yeah great-great grandpappy ended up with
gambling losses getting him into massive debt with over 97 farthings worth of [farthings drop into a bag]
debt accumulated after 20 years of bad gambling bones so in England well they
would either torture you until you found a way to pay off your debts either
legally or not or they would just throw you your family and your progeny into
essentially a work camp for generations and in fact it was this unfairness that
led to the notion of no taxation without representation in our own Constitution [US constitution appears]
so as the world turned the notion of credit fairness actually became a thing
and eventually the Fair Credit Reporting Act was established in 1970 and of
course it gave rise to the store Credit Reporting Act first adopted by Sears
where America well used to shop yeah I remember Sears catalog that was
called the Amazon back in the day all right with enormous abuse of the
credit system the haves or if the educated or the wealthy were able to get
away with nearly everything just shy of murder while the uneducated well they [Arrow points to uneducated people]
suffered the key driver in credit or an individual's access to borrowing money
revolves around the manner or form in which their credit scores were reported
and calculated in all that stuff so if you're educated you kind of know how to [Students playing video games]
game the system right and in fact with no structure behind credit reporting the
system was simply not trustworthy and it had to be codified or made into cookie
cutter nuggets each of which treated those seeking a credit score equally and
fairly individuals were able to petition to correct bad information that had
somehow leaked into their system like inaccurate information like it would do
that and sit there and haunt you for decades they were also allowed to
actually access their score and amazingly in the past people did not [Credit score rises]
necessarily have the right to view their own credit score how
weird and finally bad credit stopped being a cattle brand that lived with an
individual for their entire life new amendments allowed people to remove bad
credit annotations by paying off their debts along with the penalty and then
having good credit for three four five years after which time the negative
frowny faces were removed from their credit ratings sheets
so yeah credit reporting was finally fair and people were finally able to you [Cattle brand credit score appears]
know go in for cattle brand removal that's gotta hurt...
Up Next
What is the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act? The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act is the set of rules that debt collectors follow. These rules...