The reasons to dispute a credit charge are many–mistakes, failure to credit a return, identity theft, a lost payment that triggered penalty interest and fees, etc. Maybe the company will be nice and settle, or maybe the charge will be small an the customer will grumble and pay. But if you had a serious dispute you wanted to pursue, have you already lost?
Business Week has a cover story this week about credit card disputes are settled through arbitration. The focus is on NAF, an arbitration outfit that, by its own accounting, arbitrated 18,075 cases between a business entity and a California consumer. The score? Business won 18,045, and consumers won 30.