This is exactly what small claims court is for.
Small claims court is exempt from arbitration requirements (which are primarily aimed at avoiding class action suits). It doesn't require you to hire a lawyer, and probably won't get your account automatically nuked the way a credit-card chargeback would.
You're totally right! Please refer to paragraph 213 of your service agreement, in which you agree to binding arbitration with an arbiter of our choosing at your cost. I hope this answers all of your questions! Have a wonderful day!
Not legally enforceable, but absolutely something that it would say in order to dissuade you from going to small claims court
Just saying, small claims court is a farce. You can win, and then the losing side just ignores the verdict.
Then you can go back and figure out how to get your money, depending on the business this might be really hard.
And this isn't a hypothetical. I have had this and never seen any of the money from the judgement....
If the business has a physical presence somewhere, it's not hard. In California, you can get an order to the Sheriff for a "till tap" or an "8 hour keeper". A till tap means a sheriff's deputy or two show up and take the money out of the cash register. A "keeper" means they stand next to the cashier all day and take in money as customers pay. There are fees for this, a few hundred dollars, and they're added to the judgement, so the creditor doesn't end up paying.
The keeper can accept cash and checks, but not credit or debit cards.[1] So, while the keeper is present, the business cannot accept card payments. This disrupts most businesses so badly that they desperately scramble to come up with cash to pay their debt.[2] It gets the message across to management very effectively.
I've done this once. I got paid in full.
[1] https://sfsheriff.com/services/civil-processes/levies/carry-...
[2] https://www.grundonlaw.com/the-power-of-till-taps-debt-colle...
“Court judgments are not self-enforcing. Solvent or honest debtors will want to pay soon after judgment is entered. A judgment will show up on credit reports and will be a matter of public record. This will be a problem for any judgment debtor attempting to borrow money. Most banks will require any unsatisfied judgments to be paid before they will lend new money. …
If the judgment debtor has only personal property and no real estate, the situation is very different. Personal property depreciates with time, can be damaged and can be easily hidden. Real estate is not going anywhere. One of two things will eventually happen with a judgment lien on real estate. If the debtor is financially viable, he will eventually have to pay off the judgment lien in order to sell or refinance the property. One day, the telephone will ring and someone will want to know where to send the check.”
https://fullertonlaw.com/enforcement-of-judgment
In some places you can show up with a police escort and just start taking their stuff until the estimated value is enough to settle your debt. i.e. you can foreclose on them.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/bank-america-foreclosed-...
(Consult a lawyer before trying anything like this)
You can't do this physically do this yourself in the UK (AFAIK at least), but I've heard of people taking businesses to the small claims court in the UK, getting a default judgment because the company didn't bother showing up, then when the company refused to pay the settlement, they got the court to freeze their bank accounts and appoint a debt collector to recover the money.
How would that work for a company like Anthropic, where there's no physical store, no cashier, and no cash, even?
Another enforcement mechanism that may be available is to go back to the court and get an order to transfer the money out of their bank account, then present it to their bank and they will do it.
Assume that all the avenues a company has to enforce debts against you, you also have those avenues to enforce debts against a company. It just usually doesn't happen that way around, in practice.
You go after their bank account, which is a slightly different procedure.
The main headache is finding their bank account. The best way to do this is to find someone they pay and seeing what source account was used.
No. You can actually request those details from them. But that's a very lengthy process.
We got to the point that the other party just didn't show up, and the judge just set a new date multiple times...
The judge could've gone for a bench warrant, where a sheriff picks up the person the day before to make sure they're present... But that also didn't happen.
If there's no physical store, just cross your fingers they pay the judgement
I now want to see the movie about this happening to Google:)
That will really depend on the business. You can absolutely escalate to seizing their assets (including legal fees for the whole process) assuming you can locate them. If they take the stonewalling to the extreme and have a physical location in many (most? all?) US jurisdictions you can show up with the sheriff and a box truck and start physically taking their things as compensation. There's bodycam footage of this if you're curious.
You request the judge to apply a lien on their assets. You take that to their bank and request that it be applied, and the money paid out.
If that doesn't work, you can always go to the police/bailiff with the court order and schedule a date/time for them to go with you to their offices to seize and auction off their stuff.
does Murica not have bailiffs?
small claims court might not work against a dodgy builder, but it will certainly work against a company, with physical offices
if they don't pay up, you can literally walk into their offices and start taking their stuff, with the police supporting you
I'd start with the contents of Amodei's office
There are ways to dodge it.
A friend of mine did this for a shady company that turned out to be a 1 person company, that then dodged the fine basically by not paying and disappering. I don't know the details, but apparently something happened legally where the guy popped back up on the radar a decade later, a parking fine or something? And as a result the cops showed up to his house and started taking his stuff, causing him to actually pay the fine. I don't remember the details, but the point is it can apparently get somewhat crazy on a small size level, apparently.
I sat in small claims court one day to watch.
A plaintiff won a judgment. He asked the judge: “what do I do now?” The judge replied: “well, if you’re reading the paper one day and see ‘defendant wins the Powerball,’ then you know exactly what to do.”
This sounds like the "can't squeeze blood from a stone" principle. If they don't have anything, you can't get it from them. But if they do have something and just won't give it to you, there are other ways to escalate.
Noncompliance with a court order is one of the worst situations to be in, because a court can order almost anything to coerce compliance, including getting your bank to just send the money to the plaintiff, freezing your bank accounts, sending a sheriff to take your assets, or putting you in jail for an unlimited time until you comply - this last one often happens when cryptocurrency is involved so the court can't actually seize it. They'll just jail you until you give it up. I think the longest contempt of court time was 20ish years.
I've heard of people putting a lien on stuff like the employee's desks and chairs and then they surprise pikachu when the sheriff shows up and the assholes that didn't pay it have nowhere to sit. No idea if it's true, but it was convincing.
There was a Daily Show skit about this: https://vimeo.com/44985418
I remember someone attempting to sue my minor stepdaughter in small claims (which isn't a thing in WA, if you want to sue a minor you have to go to "real" court, but that's another matter).
Everyone all files in for the session and the Judge patiently explains... "we do not do enforcement here, to be very clear. A judgment in small claims means the court agrees you are owed what is owed in the judgment, no more. You can contain the Sheriff's Department, etc., for arranging enforcement of the judgment..."
Sure as shit, first case on the docket is some landlord/tenant dispute. Gets figured out and one of the parties is awarded $1,200... Very next comment out of his mouth, "Where do I go to pick up that check?" Judge, with a sigh, "As I explained twelve minutes ago, small claims court does not do enforcement". "I thought I went up front and picked up my check and then you got the money from him." "No. I am ... unclear ... why you think that would be the case."
I found myself wryly amused by this. Like the court is just cutting checks for every awarded verdict and "oh, we'll figure out how to make the loser pay somehow, but here, you don't need to worry about that, here's your check".
JFYI, small claims are exempt from arbitration.
I don't think you even need to go that far. Just refute the charges with your credit card. Very high likelihood of a successful refund since they already acknowledged their error in writing.
There's a fundamental power imbalance: if you do this to any service, they will likely ban your account. So the monetary reward has to be enough to merit moving all your data and workflows off them in advance and never using them again.
^ This.
I naively disputed Steam not honouring a refund (it was for about 0.5% of what I've spent with them up to that point), a couple of £pound at most. I'd paid by PayPal and as Steam refused to abide by UK law (Consumer Rights Act says broken stuff has to be fixed or refunded), I raised the issue with PayPal. I expected Steam would refund me, instead they did not dispute that they'd unlawfully failed to refund me, so PayPal - Steam's provider - cancelled the charge.
In response, Steam 'limited' my Steam account - effectively closing it temporarily. Now it's limited so they won't use PayPal to sell me anything now, so I haven't bought anything from them since [I have cashed in CS skins, and used that cash to 'buy' games].
It was an interesting lesson in 'might is right'. PayPal were able to refund the transaction because Steam want them and had no argument against the refund. Steam were able to cut me off because this appears to be a loophole in UK consumer law - sellers who break the law can just dismiss buyers who ask for refunds. Lesson learnt.
From Steam's point of view, they pissed off a customer and probably burnt 30mins-1hour of support time in answering my requests, way more than the cost of the refund. But selling games, which I later found Steam knew was broken, and then not refunding because I had the tenacity to try and fix it - meaning that the game sat open for longer than their auto-refund time - is not on imo. Petty of me for sure. Crap of Steam too.
I'm surprised UK law doesn't prohibit retaliation against the customer for insisting on his legal rights.
Not petty of you IMO. It's what everyone ought to do but it's inconvenient so most people don't.
Why should they? Freedom of association is key Western principle. Steam chose not to associate with them anymore. If the user don't like it they should have sued them in court instead.
If I report my employer for an OSHA violation and they retaliate that's illegal. Of course such laws hardly ever stopped anyone so it's a very bad idea to depend on it but the principle is certainly there.
Being able to freely threaten reprisal against people exercising their rights circumvents those rights.
Freedom of association applies to individuals; it's a non-sequiter here.
I think there's a line between retaliating against someone, and refusing to help them in the future.
I do not believe that refusing to do business with an individual, where your business provides a non-life-critical service, is retaliation. A water company refusing to provide water to your home would be problematic. A luxury handbag store refusing to allow you to purchase more luxury handbags would not.
Image as a hypothetical that a customer goes into your store for the sole purpose of wasting your support staff's time. They are not going to make a purchase. They are also not directly committing a crime. They are just hurting your business for no particular reason.
Should you, as a business owner, be forced to allow them to continue to be on your property?
I think the ideal answer is yes for critical public spaces, and no for ordinary retail.
Steam clearly falls into the latter category and should be free to ban customers for any reason save discrimination against protected classes.
> I do not believe that refusing to do business with an individual, where your business provides a non-life-critical service, is retaliation.
This isn't accurate. It might not threaten your life or pose any great hurdle to overcome but retaliation has nothing to do with that. If they did it in response to an action you took not to solve a problem but instead out of spite or to otherwise get back at you then it is retaliation.
That isn't the same as refusing to do business with someone who isn't productive to associate with. The two are entirely separate categories.
Of course any business (including Steam) will attempt to argue that an instance of the former is actually the latter, and a difficult customer will attempt to argue that an instance of the latter is actually the former. Regardless, Steam (and most other businesses) behave in a clearly retaliatory manner regarding chargebacks. In cases where the company failing to respect the individual's legal rights is what led to the chargeback that shouldn't be permissible.
To frame it in the terms you used, any otherwise legal activity stemming directly from the company having violated an individual's legal rights should be treated in the same way that a protected class is.
I think someone exercising their legal rights, such as their right to enter a business open to the public and their right to free speech inside that establishment, in a way that harms the business should be something a business can "punish" by refusing to do business with that individual.
I do not think it would be good public policy to prohibit this. I also don't believe, in the United States at least, this conduct is currently legally prohibited.
I previously gave an example of a situation in which I think the correct resolution is for the business to, as you put it, retaliate against someone exercising their legal rights.
A second example of the same type of retaliation is a business denying future sales to an individual who repeatedly purchases and then returns physical merchandise. I think blacklisting that individual is both morally and legally sound.
For the record, I think the definition of "retaliation" needs to include a desire to harm the other party. If your only desire is self-protection, I do not believe it qualifies as retaliation.
It's certainly retaliation if you can't use something you already paid for.
A limited account is allowed access to all prior purchases. It can even download those purchases again (incurring costs on Valve's part without paying anything).
I don't believe anything was rescinded in the situation being discussed; Valve just prevented the user from continuing to use their community/marketplace services. This makes sense because they were put into the bucket containing fraudulent or abusive user accounts.
Are you saying it's fine, iyo, for companies to use market position to work around consumer protection laws? I don't feel like Valve/Steam should be allowed to sell games they know are broken and then refuse refunds (they could also fix them!).
>can even download those
So what you're saying is I should find a fat juicy data pipe somewhere and download stuff from Steam until I fill /dev/null... ;oP
Seriously the. 15 minutes or so of support time will have cost more than the game did in this case, but it really is the principle. Stealing lots of small amounts from lots of people is still criminally dishonest.
It's relevant in that businesses generally also enjoy freedom of (non)association but obviously that's not an absolute.
Idealism ≠ Reality
Fuck I hate being old and having to be on this side now.
I grew up when we owned game systems and the games, and they couldn't phone home to see if I still had permission to play. I was recently considering installing Steam but this kind of thing gave me pause. I couldn't invest any money in something that could have the rug pulled out from at any time.
No that's not how that works. This stuff is a non-event. You refute the balance, they have a period where they can defend their claim (8/10 times they don't), you get your money. This is a very basic transaction that happens every single day to every major company. "Banning" you costs more than your refund and has additional legal risks.
I know being helpless against tech companies is a major trope in these comments but this is basic everyday transaction stuff. Plan on being on hold with your credit card company but not being a central target for a trillion dollar AI startup because you asked for a $100 refund.
I can tell you first-hand (from the side doing the banning) that you’re wrong.
You’re not going to get an email telling you that you’re banned. Your payments will just start being declined, and they won’t be able to help you. They’ll suggest you try another card. That won’t work either.
Maxmind includes a “chargeback risk score” in the api response for everybody who uses their minfraud service. They’re not doing that because companies don’t use it.
In any case if anybody has gotten this far in the thread just refute the charge. It's totally fine and Anthropic won't break your legs.
Yeah unless you refute ebay.
A scammer went to the trouble of creating an entirely different ebay account registered to literally "pirate[xxxxx]@..." using my same name. Then they found a tracking number to my same zip code. Then they bought (fake) items from a second scammer account using my stolen credit card to "wash" the money.
When I filed a chargeback ebay came back with a fat stack of paperwork and absolutely fucking buried me. They had the tracking number to "me", they had "me", they had the invoices to "me", they had my credit card, and their lengthy report had all the right words in all the right places and dressed up in all the right banking mumbo-jumbo and they convinced my bank so well that my bank suggested I was a fraudster myself and then my bank closed my accounts. I couldn't even sue them because at that precise time I moved cross country and couldn't get to the court to sue them in. I ended up eating the better part of $1000.
Ebay is absolutely fucking savage at chargebacks. They appear to have people trained specifically to bury in paperwork anyone that tries to challenge fraudulent charges.
I'm sorry that happened to you, but that's a <1% event. I don't know why I'm getting push back for suggesting a simple credit card refute request. It's almost as if the people responding are suggesting not doing anything is the way to go or you'll get banned--which of course, regardless of how many one off stories people may have--is a ridiculous assumption.
I can believe that, the "eBay stalking scandal" article on Wikipedia is insane.
They won’t ban you for going to small claims court?
maybe. but somebody has to manually ban you if you do that. whereas banning everybody who charges back can easily be done in batch on the billing side
Retaliating against someone for asserting their legal rights also gets way riskier what they have already won in litigation.
Good luck surviving a real court case against any faang company. They could bleed any individuals bank account with delays and forcing you to pay hundreds of thousands in lawyers retainer fees for years.
The guy who invented the windshield wipers went bankrupt and had to wait something like 20 years for his case. He won but it probably wasn't worth it.
Good point. one off banning by hand may not be worth the effort, but some code to automate it probably is.
You can always ask the judge to add include in the judgement an order that Steam not retaliate by banning or limiting your account.
I would be that would be highly unlikely to succeed. I have tried to dispute charges with my credit card for similar issues, and they always side with the business. I don’t think I they even check.
Can companies decide not to serve you on the basis of a successful lawsuit you had against them?
If not, then it might be better to go the small claims court route.
doing charge back means Anthropic will ban you forever.
Probably, but if a business cheated me out of that much I wouldn't be doing business with them again regardless so at least to me it would make no difference.
If you file pro se and even if you've agreed to ten thousand arbitration clauses, they'll at least have to spend $200 on a lawyer to respond.
So, you can waste as much of their money as they wasted of yours.
$200 for you is not the same as $200 for them
With an Anthropic engineer salary netting them about $200 per hour, yeah. Multiple people from Anthropic got eyes on this and saw it was no biggy.
It makes sense if you understand, to their eyes, that $200 is more like $10.