Facebook seems not to be paying app developer $160K in ad revenue

I am not a lawyer.

I think a mistake many people make in ongoing situations like these is contacting (and thereby deferring to) a companies 'support' channel. By asking them to reconsider, you almost subject yourself to their authority.

If you believe you have a legal dispute, you should write to them officially, cc your legal advisor if you have one. Given the sums involved I would personally take professional legal advice right now.

I didn't get the title even after reading it three times.

I am not American.

I read this sort of advice a lot here on HN and it always puzzles me. If I were to believe HN, the only way people ever do business in the US is through their lawyers. Or, at least, the moment there's some sort of misunderstanding or screwup there's always someone on HN who says "lawyer up!" and it's usually the top comment. Somehow, apparently, trying to sort things out the oldschool "hey we're both businesspeople, let's talk" way is considered a dangerous approach, and I don't understand why.

While I agree that this is probably the best approach for dealing with a company like Facebook that's notoriously difficult to get in touch with, shouldn't it really just be a "last resort" sort of thing? Why is it always recommended to start with legal threats? Isn't that the business version of "shoot first, ask questions later"?

I ask not just to criticize. My company is slowly starting to do dealings with American companies (small amounts, nothing like the stuff in this post) and if half our business communication is going to be in legalese we have some serious preparation to do.

What's difficult here is as an outsider trying to determine the validity of the complaint.

Facebook is a public company. As such -- and even more so than traditional public companies -- it interacts with a lot of people. Many of these people are scammers, sure. (I have no idea about this person.) But there are also a lot of people who just get screwed over by the algorithms. All rules-based systems have false positives, and with the kind of numbers they deal with, there has to be a lot of people being identified as bad and kicked out that aren't.

So I understand your point about businesses. But most businesses that have a 160K dispute aren't peddling it on reddit and HN.

I think we can also agree that in many cases we've seen, people have been treated wrongly by these companies and only got it fixed after publishing things in forums like this.

So what the hell? Have HN and reddit become impromptu civil courts, where the "award" is having a real, live human look at somebody's records? I know I'm not qualified to have any kind of opinion, not with just one side of the story presented and not without the records. I would feel better about stories like this if they included some kind of conversation between the two parties. "And then I spoke with the manager on the phone...."

It's not just that they cut this guy off, and it's not just that so many things are automated. It's that for all intents and purposes, FB doesn't exist as a legal entity doing business. There's no office, there's no telephone number, they just don't interact with folks like this. It makes for a hell of a time trying to make heads or tails out of stories like this. (And I understand the philosophy of not giving out too much information to potential future fraudsters, but that doesn't make my complaint go away.)

Well, if we give this guy benefit of the doubt, he says he's from Ukraine. Suing a US-based company from Ukraine would be extremely difficult, and it would have to start with an expensive lawyer versed in international law. To be fair, if it was me, I would probably ask on HN first too, mostly because there's a good chance the situation would resolve itself that way,without me having to go and talk to lawyers.