Re: Credit Card Fraud

contract??

Quite so. Often forgotten.

liability to

Are you serious ?

Depending on the circumstances of the breach, they could try.

Are you serious ?

Has any court, or Ombudsman, ever decided a dispute along these lines ?

Deadly. Contract sometimes have written into them the precise circumstances under which they may be terminated unilaterally. Minimum durations are quite common. Just look at Assured Shorthold Tenancies.

Of course.

it

method

withdraw

contract

months.

And you say that this would be of legal effect ?

compensation.

as that in which

position is the

would need to be

than* you owe them

possible.

along these lines?

I say that they haven't, shouldn't and won't. Either in the UK or Ireland. Show me that I am wrong.

Of course. If you promise to subscribe to a service for N months, the service provider is entitled to expect you to do so.

It's the same as when you agree to rent a flat for a minimum period of (say) 6 months. If something unforeseen happens, and your employer suddenly decides to make you work elsewhere, too far away to commute, then you have no automatic right just to move out and stop paying the rent. You have contracted to pay the full 6 months' rent, and the landlord can require you to pay it all. If he's in a good mood, and you find another tenant to take your place, who's at least as acceptable to him as you were, then you may be in luck.

It's an established principle of contract law that if one party breaches the contract and the other sustains a loss as a result, then the 2nd can sue the 1st for damages to make good that loss.

"Ronald Raygun" wrote

Ah, but can they force the *method* of payment of damages?

I'd like to think they can't;

- yes, a debt may exist & need to be extinguished;

- no, they can't force payment of the debt on CCA...

No, not of the damages, but of the contracted service. What I meant was that the compensation figure would include an amount for added cost of collection.

Basically, a merchant offers a service subject to various conditions. One of them is that there is a minimum period of subscription, and another is that only one method of payment is acceptable, namely CCA, because it helps keep the company's overheads low.

The customer subscribes to the service, agreeing to these conditions.

The customer then wants to stop partway through the minimum period, and withdraws the CCA.

What is the damage? It is the unpaid remainder of the minimum period subscription, plus a reasonable amount for the administrative overhead of dealing with this situation. Typically this would be called a cancellation fee, and although it would probably not explicitly say so, implicitly part of the cancellation fee will cover the cost of handling a nonstandard form of payment. The company could well waive the cancellation fee if it were to be allowed simply to collect the subscription fee normally for the remainder of the period. But typically the wanting-to-be-ex customer would resist this, and would then need to be sued, adding court fees to the debt.

Let's not forget that *two* contract terms have been breached. (1) The agreed minimum period, for which damages are the balance of the subscription, and (2) the agreed payment method, for which damages are the additional cost of collection by other means.