Thread: Does this judgement affect credit cards?

Prior to this, we could still claim credit card charges while the court case was ongoing...Does this ruling have any bearing on citing OFT guidelines in claiming credit card charges?

I guess the reason I asked this was that when I wrote to a credit card company about refunding my charges, I used the template from the Martin Lewis (MoneySavingExpert) website as my basis, which mentions the OFT 2006 statement on CC charges.

When I did this, the CC company responded with a standard template saying quoting OFT guidelines and saying that I wouldn't be entitled to a refund, to which I responded with an lba, quoting the relevant paragraphs that confirmed I could still challenge the unfair charges in court. At which point they caved and paid up.

Because of this, in my future responses to other CC companies I intended to modify my original letter to make it clear that I recognised the OFT guidelines and understood that I could still challenge them, and that this was therefore an LBA. I hoped this would reduce the amount of cat and mouse games they would play with me, and get straight to the point of offering a goodwill payment (which I would probably accept).

However, while the statement applied to CC charges and not bank charges, I would assume yesterday's decision would give CC companies some wiggle room in their responses to say that the judgement yesterday indicates that the OFT statement on CC charges is now also irrelevant, so mentioning OFT guidelines when claiming CC charges is probably not worth it now?

I know the CAG templates take a different approach to asking for CC charges to be refunded:

"I now understand that the regime of fees which you have been applying to my account in relation to late fees and over limit charges, are unlawful at Common Law, Statute and recent Consumer regulations.

I would draw your attention to the terms of the contract which you agreed to at the time that I opened my account. It is an implied term of that contract that you would conduct yourselves lawfully and in a manner which complies with UK law.

I am frankly shocked that you have operated my account in this way as I had always reposed confidence in your integrity and expertise as my fiduciary."

So perhaps I should ditch the MSE template mentioning OFT guidelines, despite it's previous success, and re-write my future letters based on the CAG template instead?