Credit card companies have long required consumers to participate in arbitration to settle disputes over unpaid bills. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, the nation’s largest mediators, the National Arbitration Forum (NAF) and the American Arbitration Association, have stopped hearing such cases. Moreover, credit card companies are increasingly dropping the requirement for arbitration.

Why? According to the WSJ, NAF allegedly didn’t handle arbitration fairly and impartially. Indeed, the company may have been deciding against consumers so that its sister company, Axiant LLC, could collect the debt. The Minnesota Attorney General alleged in July that the parent company, Accretive, was working both sides of the aisle, as an arbiter and as a collection agency. Accretive was also tied to the Mann Bracken law firm, which is known for representing credit card companies in arbitration. It’s no surprise, then, that an NAF official recently testified to Congress that 94% of debt collection arbitrations found in favor of the credit card companies - and that a former arbitrator who is a Harvard law professor testified that NAF stopped using her after she ruled in favor of a consumer.