Section 75

All too often we hear the message to take our s75 complaint to the credit (card) company (CCC) and they will sort it out and get you a refund - NOT always TRUE, in my experience.

I once had reason to claim for faulty and misrepresented goods, value about £400:- I got a refund in a few days, no hassle - the CCC was my FRIEND.

Recently, however, I have just pursued two s75 claims. via the Financial Ombudsman Service for a brand new £26,000 car (£1,000 deposit paid on credit card) on grounds of not of satisfactory quality and misrepresentation - CCC dug in their heels - and both cases were declined by the FOS.

In the latter case, the CCC's complaint form asked my permission to communicate with the merchant to conduct their investigation - as I had nothing to hide, I agreed - FATAL MISTAKE!

Instead of asking open ended questions of the merchant, so as to extract honest and reliable testimony from the merchant as to what actually happened during the sale process, the credit card company conducted its questioning so as to 'invite responses of a certain sort' (I am advised this is the legal terminology), or with 'leading questions' if you prefer in plain English. Having been 'tipped-off', the merchant's response was simply a convenient, (for them) 'failure to recollect' the critical pre-sale conversation and, subsequently, the merchant was thereby empowered to evade providing any substantive answers to enquiries by the FOS, such that the FOS could not identify any detrimental points in the merchant's glib offerings - all the merchant had to do to achieve a stalemate was to avoid the truth of the car's true configuration becoming exposed. Furthermore, when one reads the tone of the language of the correspondence between the CCC and the merchant it's clear that they were in cahoots, as joint defendants.

The FOS acknowledged my complaint about how the CCC had conducted their investigation with the merchant and thereby compromised the value/reliability of testimony from the merchant, but said they could not provide me with redress because the FOS are not the Regulator. In the absence of any meaningful information from the merchant, and in spite of the CCC's conduct in facilitating this paucity of information, the FOS ombudsman decided that, on the basis of the [unsubstantiated] claims from the merchant that they would 'know the product' then, the merchant is always right in this situation - this despite the fact that both the merchant and the credit card company provided false testimony as to the configuration of the car.

By compromising the reliability of testimony from the merchant, the CCC was my FOE.

I have since become aware that if an s75 claim is made to a CCC and subsequently becomes referred to an ombudsman, then the CCC has to foot the cost of the FOS's investigation - I am led to believe it is a 'fixed fee' in the region of £400-£500, regardless of the value of the claim.

Thus it can be seen that if the value of the s75 claim is less than, say, £1,000, the CCC has little incentive to contest the claim and, since the majority of claims are likely to be less than £1,000, and hence settled without contest, it can be seen how an overall impression that the CCC's are the consumer's FRIEND can easily come to pervade. On the other hand, in those instances, like mine, where the claim value is high and the CCC is motivated to contest the claim, then they can very easily compromise the fair conduct of a consumer's claim - they are then your FOE. Not a bad tactic from the credit (card) company's perspective - 'tip-off' the joint-defender merchant and compromise the conduct of the investigation in an endeavour to result in a stalemate stand-off - it's then mathematically worth taking the risk of having to pay the FOS fee if the consumer takes it further, when the result of the compromising is a 50% probability winning/losing £26,000.

My point is that I cannot see how a consumer can protect themselves from a credit (card) company deliberately sabotaging an investigation so as to make it more difficult for the consumer to make their claim successfully. I am in the process of making a report to the Financial Conduct Authority about this credit card company's behaviour - the FCA have advised me that they will not be able to help ME at all, but they will investigate and consider what might be possible to protect consumers from such behaviour.

I am not sure what suggestions to make - all I can say is that this is what happened to me - try not to let it happen to you.

Isbjorn wrote: »

........

and has what to do with the OP or the refund they are getting?

1. The remotely operated central locking system shuts down, unpredictably, denying access - the manual access key is NOT on the door which most likely affords the highest probability of regaining entry i.e. the door by which the car was last exited i.e. the driver's door, no, instead it is on the front passenger door, which in my instance (and many other people's instances) was too close to an immoveable object to allow access. The 'call-out' personnel could only recover the situation by forcing the driver's door open, distorting it in the process. The FOS ombudsman decided (bizzarely, in my opinion) that being randomly locked out was a "feature of the car" and therefore it was 'fit for purpose' and failed to address the necessary subsequent question, 'well, if being locked out is OK, then are the safeguards for making re-entry adequate?'
2. I once had a cam belt break, with catastrophic damage to the engine - I did not want another car with a cam belt - the salesman told me this car had its camshafts driven by a chain - when I examined the engine, I found it had a cam belt. Despite me proving that the merchant and the credit card company's 'expert' had both provided false testimony that the car has never been available with chain driven camshafts, the FOS ombudsman, bizzarely again, decided that the merchant 'would have known the product' and therefore would not have given me false information.

Lesson? NEVER buy a car with a keyless entry system where the emergency manual access key is NOT on the driver's door (there are lots of examples). Buy and use a body cam to record conversations with salesmen.