Regardless of what you think of the “fine print” it’s there for everyone to read prior to buying a ticket and it is also a notorious and well know policy. You know about it so when next you buy a ticket you cannot claim a fraud has occurred. Save the historonics for true fraud.
If there was a clause on page 234 of your mortgage or insurance policy that let them kill you and harvest your organs, that would be wrong, even if you should have read it before you signed.
Fraud is not getting what you were sold. You were sold a ticket for conveyance from one point to another. Failure to provide that should have consequences severe enough deter even a worldwide organization.
Screw the weasel words, anybody who would enforce them, those who write them; if we don't have the power of the law on our side then social media will have to suffice; it is a crude, inaccurate and unreliable weapon, but as long as we have jack boot lickers who think that it should under any circumstance be legal for someone who has been sold something to be forcefully deprived of it, it will have to suffice.
As with ventilating burglars, better an arbitrary and extreme deterrent than merely shrugging one’s shoulders and saying ‘not worth the fight’
Overbooking should be made illegal. Since it won't be due to the size, wealth and power of the airlines then I hope EVERY time someone is treated thusly it becomes a media event that costs them orders of magnitude more than they save from the entire process.