Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It's not the $7, but the principle

antti.vilpponen.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 67 posts

Re: It's not the $7, but the principle

#31

Post by rmc »

jonknee wrote: post #29
rmc wrote: post #20

Chargeback time. That action on their part might be viewed as fraud.

Actually it would be fraudulent to not charge what was selected to be ordered. It was a bug that didn't save the selection properly (possibly just in Firefox too, the template didn't look that bad), but it was perfectly visible what was selected when the OP made the order.

IANAL, but this gets complicated. It all depends on whether a reasonable person, when seeing the error page with "no spaces in credit card field", would presume that nothing else in the form changed. If so, and the merchant is aware that most people presume that, then it could be fraud.

They are making a financial gain, by being aware that the terms have changed, and by misleading the customer into thinking that nothing has changed, they could be committing fraud.

The customer choose the original selection, and the merchant's systems swapped in a different, more expensive, version without telling the customer at the last moment, knowing that most people don't re-read everything again, then yes, that's fraud.

Re: It's not the $7, but the principle

#32

Post by seszett »

Spidler wrote: post #14
chx wrote: post #12

Oh my god, how I hate forms that reset themselves over an error! It's newsletter subscriptions... or the misc textarea... or something... that gets lost when I enter a Canadian post code with the space in the middle. Or without the space in the middle. Both have triggered errors :( Why can't you people just use Drupal which has a forms system that I have contributed to a lot and it handles rebuilds like this with eas…

Because drupal does a lot of other things "interestingly", for example account name and email-validation?

What's so bad about account name an email validation in Drupal? It's one of the few apps/CMS/frameworks that get it right and allow people to use their real name instead of forcing them to come up with some poor ASCII-only string to represent them.

Re: It's not the $7, but the principle

#33

Post by jeffclark »

vilpponen wrote: post #26
UnoriginalGuy wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, but the article doesn't say they refused a refund. The bug seems deeper than just their front end, their back-end is showing the "wrong" (actually right) subscription selected, but their payment provider clearly charged for the wrong one. So I guess they now need to consolidate their payments received (likely via a payment provider) with their own system to see if this or any other orders are inconsistent. Th…

OP here. They haven't refused of a refund per se, but since I am unable to reach them with the second request - it is comparable to "let's leave this be and maybe it will go away".

If it's really just a front-end bug, chances are they're getting lots of calls just like yours. You may just be part of a pile of callback tickets once the bug is fixed and all the refunds are processed. Or, they could still be trying to track down the root cause of the bug in the first place.

Re: It's not the $7, but the principle

#35

Post by shawnz »

alextingle wrote: post #15
gommm wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how it is in Finland but here in France it's very difficult to do a chargeback... I tried once for something that was never delivered and my bank blew me off. It's nowhere as easy as in the US. It's not even that that I lost the chargeback, it's that they didn't even let me initiate it.

Your bank has nothing to do with it. You need to contact your credit card company. (Chargebacks are a credit card thing, the CC company is an intermediary, so you can complain to them about poor service. If you use your bank card to buy things online, then you've paid - and it's between you and the vendor. That's why you should always use a credit card to make online purchases.)

I don't know about the parent, but where I live, credit cards are most commonly issued by banks.

Re: It's not the $7, but the principle

#36

Post by _wp3r »

runarb wrote: post #18
jhdevos wrote: post #11

Does seem like an 'honest' bug. I did what the OP did (except I checked the middle option), and when you then look at the source of the page, it includes The 'div' that you had checked earliers has an empty 'CHECKED' attribute, while the third one has the 'checked=""' that firefox apparently picks up.

Agree. The author is jumping to conclusions her. Remind me of this great quote: "Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence" - Napoleon Bonaparte

Probably not a Bonaparte quote. The below is an interesting history of how that quote got into the hacker consciousness. Mostly from the Jargon file.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

Re: It's not the $7, but the principle

#37

Post by arjie »

rmc wrote: post #31
jonknee wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it would be fraudulent to not charge what was selected to be ordered. It was a bug that didn't save the selection properly (possibly just in Firefox too, the template didn't look that bad), but it was perfectly visible what was selected when the OP made the order.

IANAL, but this gets complicated. It all depends on whether a reasonable person, when seeing the error page with "no spaces in credit card field", would presume that nothing else in the form changed. If so, and the merchant is aware that most people presume that, then it could be fraud. They are making a financial gain, by being aware that the terms have changed, and by misleading the customer into thinking that noth…

In addition, they claim that he purchased the 32.99 subscription. That step is unethical plain and simple. If you take 20 dollars from me and then claim I only paid 10, you bet it's going to look bad.

Re: It's not the $7, but the principle

#38

Post by pwg »

From the article: " I entered my credit card number with spacing like 1234 1234 1234 1234 and all the other information as necessary. After I clicked “Submit your order”, the form returned an error and asked me to fix the credit card number so that there are no spaces ..."

Why do so many web developers insist on forcing me to enter a 16 digit number _without_ spaces when a computer is excellent (and fast) at removal of spaces and I am not so good at validating I've typed a 16 digit number correctly when that number lacks the spaces?

Re: It's not the $7, but the principle

#39

Post by samatman »

_wp3r wrote: post #36
runarb wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. The author is jumping to conclusions her. Remind me of this great quote: "Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence" - Napoleon Bonaparte

Probably not a Bonaparte quote. The below is an interesting history of how that quote got into the hacker consciousness. Mostly from the Jargon file. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

I had never read that! Charming. The punchline is, it's actually Heinlein's razor. Which makes perfect sense.

(yes the wiki refers to a Robert Hanlon of Scranton, PA. This is probably only amusing if you're from America and know that Scranton is the archetypal funny place to be from)

Post reply on HN