[Mr Angry]

""Millions of people are being ripped off by their own banks, plunging the poorest deeper into debt. The Office of Fair Trading has failed to act...".

This is where the confusion begins for most people. Many people are under the impression due to the OFT statement of last April that a charge of £12.00 or less is legal - this is not the case. I was one of a number of people involved in the legal lobbying of the OFT to look into these charges and we were decidely disappointed that they proved themselves, in the end, to be toothless.

The OFT, it became clear from the start, was not prepared to expose this racket for what it is because of the potential damage to certain business interests. We have asked, repeatedly, where the OFT arrived at the mythical "£12.00 threshold" fee and they have to date, in much the same way as the crooks who levy such fees, failed to respond with anything beyond "We estimate that....".

The OFT were well aware of the can of worms which had been opened and tried, unsuccessfully, to bring the banks to the table to come to an early resolution. The banks, in their naivety, thought that consumer rights could be trampled on and that those exposing their fraud would be written off as "crackpots" and derided with the usual cries of "But if it wasn't legal...". To a degree they were right. However, we now find ourselves in a very different scenario where banks and other companies are refunding tens of thousands of pounds a day because their previously sacrosanct legal teams know, and have advised them, that the game is up and they have been rumbled as complicit in one of the largest commercial frauds in modern histiory.

The one concession to the lobbying that the OFT did make, under extreme duress I must add, was their inclusion of the caveat "a court will certainly not consider that a default fee is fair just because it is below the threshold."

They included the above only because two previous precedents in consumer contract law were brought to their attention. The fact of the matter is that once a charge constitutes anything above and beyond the genuine costs of administration it becomes illegal under consumer contract law (this will cover most if not all contracts anyone reading these forae will encounter in their lifetime). If you have been charged a fee in relation to any default or late payment then you should write to the party involved asking for a full explanation of the breakdown, not some sweeping generalization, of that charge. If they, for whatever reason, cannot provide you with this then you can be almost 100% guaranteed that there is an element of profit involved in the charge (ever wondered why charges never consist of a "pence" element?).

Take it to court and, like the many thousands of others before you, you will win.