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Surprise, pay $1000

forestwalk.ai

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Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#171

Post by mystraline »

inigyou wrote: post #128
mystraline wrote: post #84

So ive done this before when I deal with predatory and 'free trial' companies. Go get a $20 gas station credit card. They get THAT card, and whatever name you want to provide. When they demand $x000 for their free trial, they get.... $20! And before anyone bemoans their 50+ page onesided "contract" that weasel-words revokes 'free trial'... Sure, they can publish a claim and sell off a debt to "John Q Public". We can…

If they can prove you agreed to the charges, they can follow it up with debt collection companies or lawsuits, and that will cost you a lot more than just paying what you agreed to pay.

Reread the last paragraph.

And let me know how a lawsuit against "John Q Public" will go, along with an email from fakemail.net and a gas station preloaded credit card.

Companies deserve this sort of treatment if they say shit like "FREE TRIAL" and silently convert you to 'you owe money' with no hard limits. And naturally, paragraph 37, sentence 12 includes this disclaimer. That should be blatantly clear, but its not cause they are scammers.

So, fuck'em.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#172

Post by rafram »

inigyou wrote: post #162
rafram wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "US-imposed" you presumably mean ICANN-imposed.

Yes? ICANN is part of the US, and has been strong-armed by the US government into imposing restrictive rules on gTLDs even though they appear like they're global.

Any actual evidence that the US government has control over ICANN? I know they used to have an agreement that gave the US some oversight, but as far as I know that ended a decade ago.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#173

Post by baobabKoodaa »

inigyou wrote: post #167
baobabKoodaa wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main issue is that you deceptively communicated what happens at the end of the free trial. You decided to use the wording "disruption", which implies that workloads will be stopped, which is the opposite of what happened. This is deceptive and predatory. I will never use your software and after this happened I am AMAZED that anybody else (particularly OP, but also anybody who read this post) will continue to trus…

This whole incident supplied them a lot more publicity. I had never heard of them before today. Since today, I'm more likely to use them, not less, because now I know they exist. I couldn't be less likely than zero.

Awful, but true.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#174

Post by bot403 »

flexagoon wrote: post #116
Defletter wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably depends on the bank, but setting one's overdraft limit to zero doesn't necessarily help and may actually make things worse: some payments may still go through even if you don't have the funds, putting you in unauthorised overdraft, which tends to have a high daily fee.

That is insane. What's the point of overdraft limit if it doesn't limit your overdraft?

First time? You can choose between the $20 convenience fee or the $50 no-fee fee.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#175

Post by inigyou »

mystraline wrote: post #171
inigyou wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they can prove you agreed to the charges, they can follow it up with debt collection companies or lawsuits, and that will cost you a lot more than just paying what you agreed to pay.

Reread the last paragraph. And let me know how a lawsuit against "John Q Public" will go, along with an email from fakemail.net and a gas station preloaded credit card. Companies deserve this sort of treatment if they say shit like "FREE TRIAL" and silently convert you to 'you owe money' with no hard limits. And naturally, paragraph 37, sentence 12 includes this disclaimer. That should be blatantly clear, but its not…

Oh, that's fun, because IIRC providing fake details makes it criminal fraud, automatically. They get to seek security camera footage from the gas station, subpoena your ISP to find who held your IP address (hope you used Tor) and subpoena fakemail.net for the same.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#176

Post by inigyou »

rafram wrote: post #172
inigyou wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes? ICANN is part of the US, and has been strong-armed by the US government into imposing restrictive rules on gTLDs even though they appear like they're global.

Any actual evidence that the US government has control over ICANN? I know they used to have an agreement that gave the US some oversight, but as far as I know that ended a decade ago.

ICANN exists in the US, therefore the US government has control over it.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#177

Post by thaumasiotes »

ffsm8 wrote: post #73
mathgeek wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internet access used to be billed by the minute back in the Prodigy/Compuserve/AOL days, and early phone plans mirrored that for ease of marketing.

Other way around. The phone plans were billed by the minute. Then came the Internet. In is first generation, Internet was essentially just a long distance call through a modem. Hence it was billed - like the call - by the minute. Dedicated Internet wires came much later, and then the dedicated phone lines were dropped as voip was better quality and cheaper compared to the dedicated lines. While the phone still had a…

> Dedicated Internet wires came much later, and then the dedicated phone lines were dropped as voip was better quality and cheaper compared to the dedicated lines.

The telephone network made the utterly bizarre choice to intentionally degrade the audio signal of a call, guaranteeing that people would have an unnatural, distorted voice if you spoke to them over the phone. There was no way for voip not to be better quality.

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#178

Post by thaumasiotes »

giantrobot wrote: post #140
ffsm8 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other way around. The phone plans were billed by the minute. Then came the Internet. In is first generation, Internet was essentially just a long distance call through a modem. Hence it was billed - like the call - by the minute. Dedicated Internet wires came much later, and then the dedicated phone lines were dropped as voip was better quality and cheaper compared to the dedicated lines. While the phone still had a…

Online services most assuredly billed by the minute. He'll, AOL had a huge marketing campaign offering "free" minutes for new customers. You might also have charges from the phone company but those were independent of the online service charges. It wasn't until the late 90s the major online services went to flat rate "unlimited" plans.

> Online services most assuredly billed by the minute. He'll, AOL had a huge marketing campaign offering "free" minutes for new customers. You might also have charges from the phone company but those were independent of the online service charges.

AOL was offering free minutes because it was an ISP, not because it was an online service. (It was also an online service. Most of that service was indeed free; some of it billed by the minute, but that was separate from the rate you paid for connecting to the internet.)

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#179

Post by tristor »

rcleveng wrote: post #115
Natsu wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, I got a fraud call recently because CrunchyRoll decided to try to renew a subscription I abandoned years ago and the card they have is expired. I know it wasn't me because I gave up entirely on the service after they changed something about their login systems to reject my password and I could no longer get in. Support wanted me to jump through a lot of hoops and I just refused, choosing instead to just stop d…

This happens with me every year with Barnes and Noble bookstore. I canceled their annual membership back in like 2018, Starting in 2021 this zombie account started charging me for a renewal. I reached out to support and they disavowed any knowledge of how this could happen, had no record of charging me, and no clue how it could have happened. Since Amex is nice about allowing someone who charged you in the past - kee…

I have this exact same thing happening with B&N. Did you ever figure out how to get it to stop?

Re: Surprise, pay $1000

#180

Post by greg-m »

kmoser wrote: post #160
greg-m wrote: post #108

Hey folks - Greg here, I do product at Blacksmith. I want to say upfront - we've never pursued these invoices. If someone feels they didn't get value from the service, we've eaten that cost and always will. There's a bit of an implicit policy decision on our side here that we did a bad job of communicating - I want to clarify that, and then talk about how we can fix it. First, we wanted to let customers start using B…

> I want to say upfront - we've never pursued these invoices. At first glance that sounds admirable, but the flipside is that it implies Blacksmith knows they're being shady: if you know you're not going to pursue it, why did you invoice the customer in the first place? This sounds less like you're forgiving a charity case and more like you're waiving an invoice because the customer identified it as unethical to begi…

Hey there -

I partially disagree! We issue an invoice because the customer did consume the services - a lot of folks appreciate that, since it gives their AP team a real cost to work from instead of a ballpark of us vs. GitHub.

My "we never pursue these" comment wasn't about us knowing the charge was shady - it was to clarify we have no strategy of chasing people/litigating over invoices they weren't aware of, which came up a bunch in the thread.

I do agree that pushing surprised customers through a support ticket is wrong, and that our in-product language compounded that issue. Controlling this belongs in the product so we can hit the mark on trust - we're building that now.

This isn't shady for most folks, since they're typically comparing us to known, expensive alternative. For those who are surprised by their spend (which given GHA's upper-bound pricing has been a minority) our reconciliation flow was for them to contact support, and my comment was to clarify that we don't have an intentional strategy to pursue folks for invoices they weren't aware of. It's clear to me that controlling this behavior belongs in the product so we can hit the mark on trust - we're working on adding that now.

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