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.

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Finance a la shmoop what is the Fair Credit Reporting Act? alright so think

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old the Englande it's 1604 and your family is still working the barley [Family carrying barley]

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fields because great-great-grandfather smeltwagon wasn't very good at rolling

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the bones he lost a lot of money so yeah great-great grandpappy ended up with

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gambling losses getting him into massive debt with over 97 farthings worth of [farthings drop into a bag]

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debt accumulated after 20 years of bad gambling bones so in England well they

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would either torture you until you found a way to pay off your debts either

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legally or not or they would just throw you your family and your progeny into

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essentially a work camp for generations and in fact it was this unfairness that

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led to the notion of no taxation without representation in our own Constitution [US constitution appears]

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so as the world turned the notion of credit fairness actually became a thing

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and eventually the Fair Credit Reporting Act was established in 1970 and of

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course it gave rise to the store Credit Reporting Act first adopted by Sears

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where America well used to shop yeah I remember Sears catalog that was

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called the Amazon back in the day all right with enormous abuse of the

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credit system the haves or if the educated or the wealthy were able to get

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away with nearly everything just shy of murder while the uneducated well they [Arrow points to uneducated people]

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suffered the key driver in credit or an individual's access to borrowing money

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revolves around the manner or form in which their credit scores were reported

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and calculated in all that stuff so if you're educated you kind of know how to [Students playing video games]

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game the system right and in fact with no structure behind credit reporting the

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system was simply not trustworthy and it had to be codified or made into cookie

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cutter nuggets each of which treated those seeking a credit score equally and

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fairly individuals were able to petition to correct bad information that had

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somehow leaked into their system like inaccurate information like it would do

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that and sit there and haunt you for decades they were also allowed to

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actually access their score and amazingly in the past people did not [Credit score rises]

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necessarily have the right to view their own credit score how

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weird and finally bad credit stopped being a cattle brand that lived with an

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individual for their entire life new amendments allowed people to remove bad

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credit annotations by paying off their debts along with the penalty and then

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having good credit for three four five years after which time the negative

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frowny faces were removed from their credit ratings sheets

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so yeah credit reporting was finally fair and people were finally able to you [Cattle brand credit score appears]

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know go in for cattle brand removal that's gotta hurt...

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