191–200 of 210 posts
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It is theft too. Theft caused by incompetence and out–sourced customer support is still theft.
No. Theft requires intent. If we accept that it's incompetence and no one actually intended to apply the fee to an electric vehicle then it is not theft.
Half of the stories about billing for unused gas are clearly just theft. Why do consumers have no recourse against companies that steal from them? If I made charges to someone's card for services that weren't rendered, I'd probably go to jail.
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False accusations and convictions ruin people's lives. I'm not sure why these companies are not mandated to pay people's current income and expected income growth over the course of their working lives because it'll probably be hard for these people to ever find a job again. For instance, if I make $500k today, the company should be obligated to pay me this amount every year plus additional compounding interest on th…
Wouldn't that incentivize people to try to get companies to "ruin their lives"? If someone had a way to get a well paying income, then get a big company to do the bare minimum that counts as "ruining their lives", they live the rest of their lives comfortably without having to get a job. I think that, in theory, compensating people for life-ruining is obviously the right thing to do. The issue is that it relies on pe…
Unlike the current system which relies on companies to be perfect and never try to abuse the system.
Of course, companies abusing the system happens far, far more often and at far, far larger scales than people abusing the system.
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I wonder about this constantly. Why is there such a legal power imbalance between people and companies, especially large companies? If a company wants to charge me extra they just do it, they don't have to provide proof of anything. If I want to resolve the issue I have to call them or my credit card company, neither is simple and has something like a 75% chance of being successful (IME) even if I'm completely right.…
The question shouldn't be "why" because the answer is obvious: Companies have more money and more people and more time and therefore more power than you as an individual. The solution also already exists: The government should be giving individuals free lawyers to go after companies who violate their rights. We have this system in my country where there is a people's lawyer that can choose to take up cases that seem…
We also have this in the US, actually we have many (state attorney generals, federal FTC and CFPB, and so on). Unfortunately (similar to our cops with crime), they're only going to bother to do anything if a company is blatantly screwing over somewhere between hundreds and thousands of people, or if the person complaining is a wealthy political donor or otherwise a friend of an elected official.
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> I've long thought the only solution to these issues is to levy fines (or jail time if intentional theft) large enough to discourage the behavior. If it is still happening, keep raising the fines until it stops. We need a corporate death penalty and three strike laws - where three is scaled to the customer base or total monetary damages or whatever. Upon death, any and all assets (including shares of the company, in…
It's not companies that do this kind of stuff, it's people working at companies. You just jail/fine those people and all the chain of command up to the CEO. That would be an incentive to establish good procedures and not to steal on customers.
That would of course require them to strive to provide the best product or service they can rather than towards maximizing their profit, though.
Half of the stories about billing for unused gas are clearly just theft. Why do consumers have no recourse against companies that steal from them? If I made charges to someone's card for services that weren't rendered, I'd probably go to jail.
> Why do consumers have no recourse against companies that steal from them? Stuff like this is easy to charge back with your credit card company. But in this case, the article makes it clear that the people were able to get the charges reversed by talking to Hertz. It wasn't necessarily convenient, but the funds were returned when a human saw the mistake. > If I made charges to someone's card for services that weren'…
Hah. Your card company will accept the dispute, Hertz will provide them with the rental contract you signed and say "he agreed to pay it!", and your card company will close the dispute without ever even following up with you.
> But in this case, the article makes it clear that the people were able to get the charges reversed by talking to Hertz. It wasn't necessarily convenient, but the funds were returned when a human saw the mistake.
Actually the article makes it clear that they had to go round and round in circles with bot-like support reps who probably haven't ever seen a Tesla in whatever slum they can afford.
> If you entered into an agreement with someone to do business and then accidentally charged them the wrong amount, you would not go to jail.
It's not accidental when you keep doing it until the news gets involved. BTW, how can they even charge a fuel fee without a human being involved to... you know... fuel it? Shouldn't that human have noticed that there was no gas tank? Hmm... Almost like it wasn't accidental.
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> Stuff like this is easy to charge back with your credit card company. That's not actually true. This sort of "oh, you never have to pay for services not rendered" is mostly just a fiction. I've had multiple issues with major credit card issuers who refused to persist chargebacks when vendors screwed me. The other issue is that, even if you successfully chargeback against a vendor, oftentimes that vendor is a monopo…
> The other issue is that, even if you successfully chargeback against a vendor, oftentimes that vendor is a monopoly or duopoloy, and they will terminate your account and ban any new accounts using the same name or card number, and you'll be screwed. Did you tell that (by letter) to your district or state attorney?
Half of the stories about billing for unused gas are clearly just theft. Why do consumers have no recourse against companies that steal from them? If I made charges to someone's card for services that weren't rendered, I'd probably go to jail.
at what point does something like this garner class-action attention? most of the money ends up going to the lawyers, though…
Half of the stories about billing for unused gas are clearly just theft. Why do consumers have no recourse against companies that steal from them? If I made charges to someone's card for services that weren't rendered, I'd probably go to jail.
It's not theft. Rather just regular old big company incompetence. You're dealing with broken automated systems and an out-sourced customer support agent. Wait until LLMs arrive on the scene and further exacerbate the problem.
Big company incompetence exists because, paradoxically, it's more profitable.
The solution is making it less profitable, or better yet treating the business like you'd treat a human. Put a derogatory report on their credit and make sure they can't get any kind of credit (often even including pre-paid rent) for 7 years....
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I think you are misunderstanding the comment you replied to. They are saying that whenever a customer at a grocery store checkout was charged an incorrect price, the price was always higher than the advertised price, never lower. Yes, customers that notice it can have it corrected to the accurate, lower price. But the problem is that whenever there were "whoopsies", it's hard to just believe it was just a bug or well…
My favorite is the new "digital coupon" version where just having the loyalty card isn't enough - you also have to have the app, add the coupon to your account, and HOPEFULLY by the time you reach the register that coupon has "posted" and the register applies it for you lol.