the initial purchaser sells his goods to another person. A merchant cannot ask a consumer to pay any fees or shipping charges in order to be eligible to receive their legal guarantee. The office for the protection of consumers does not take a particular stance towards extended warranties. However, they recommend that consumers should be vigilant and question themselves whether the warranty really adds anything to the already applicable legal warranty. Finally they point out that the number of consumers who go to court against merchants in order for them to apply the legal warranty is almost proportional to the number of consumers who take legal means against a merchant for failing to respect extended warranties they have sold. United States In the United States, extended warranties are regulated by many state insurance commissioners as "service contracts." Service contracts can cover automobiles, consumer goods (such as appliances, electronics, lawn equipment, etc...) and homes. The regulatory structure requires licensure or registration of the warranty providers, financial solvency regulation, and service contract consumer disclosures. Service warranty "providers" apply for licensure or registration, and then may sell their products, usually at the point of sale of the product, for example at the car dealership, or at the retail consumer electronics store, but some companies such as After, Inc, SquareTrade, Warranty Direct and Motoreasy also sell directly to consumers. In the United States, a type of extended warranty called vehicle service contracts are typically regulated by the states as insurance. At one point, California issued a cease and desist letter to several corporations which were selling the insurance illegally in the state; the corporations contended that it was not insurance because the contracts required that certain additives be used. The Service Contract Industry Council was founded by Fredrick D. Schaufeld and Bernie Schermer in 1988 and is a trade association of members of the industry. United Kingdom The extended warranty market has been subject to several investigations. In 2002 the Office of Fair Trading decided that self-regulation of the industry had failed and passed the case onto the Competition Commission. This concluded that the market was not acting in the interests of consumers. The Citizens Advice Bureau have expressed concerns about extended warranties being mis-sold. The Office of Fair trading investigated the extended warranty market again and published a market review in 2012. They said that the UK market is worth an estimated £1billion