We’ve all been guilty from time to time of racing through a signup process for something, and when the window pops up with the terms and conditions, we’re not ashamed to admit that we sometimes click the “I have read the terms and conditions” box falsely. No, you have not read the terms and conditions, you just don’t believe there is anything in there that’s going to matter all that much. You just want to buy a giant foam finger, what could possibly be the harm of letting it slide?

For sure, there will be times when you don’t need to follow the Ts and Cs, and for full disclosure, most of the time it’s not going to end badly. But you really should read the legalese that pops up on the screen in front of you, and this isn’t just because you might be asked about them later. Below, we’ll make clear why it is so important to go through the details even if it seems boring.

Things go wrong sometimes

When you’ve pretended to have read the terms and conditions and it hasn’t done you any harm, that is usually because everything that you wanted to happen as happened. The giant foam finger has arrived within the specified time window and nobody has to call and ask about it. Terms and conditions exist so that the parties in a dispute have a road map to figure things out. And things do go wrong at times. Your item doesn’t arrive, your bonus didn’t get credited when you signed up to a casino on casinononaams.casino, or you weren’t on the boarding list for a flight. Now, you need to talk to someone about what went wrong.

Why did things go wrong?

If you speed through the terms and conditions on a special offer, and click “Done” before you really are, then you are agreeing to something, and you don’t really know what it is. It might be a completely legitimate specification from the merchant: you can buy a toaster and get a kettle free, as long as the toaster was from a specific line; you can get a bonus free bet, but only if you make a qualifying bet first, and so on. This is important, because you might have spent money on the basis that you would be getting something “extra” – but if you agreed to the deal without reading what its terms were, you’re liable and you might have signed a contract saying so.

Will it always end badly?

It’s more accurate to say that you can’t guarantee things won’t end badly. You may dispute an issue with a merchant and they say “you know what, OK, we’ll refund you”. This is generally known as a “gesture of goodwill” – the merchant isn’t accepting fault, and maybe you should have acted differently, but they don’t want to lose a customer and you’re far from the only person who doesn’t read things before signing them. But contract law doesn’t see it that way, and if you make a fuss after something has gone wrong, sometimes you might find that you were the reason it went wrong.