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

How I Collected a Debt from an Unscrupulous Merchant

mtlynch.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 270 posts

Re: How I Collected a Debt from an Unscrupulous Merchant

#91

Post by jb1991 »

noodlesUK wrote: post #63
TomSwirly wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are laws against this sort of thing. In another country, like the one I now live in, this would be a job for law enforcement. You'd just hand over your files to some branch of the government, and in a surprisingly short amount of time, you'd get some money, but also, the site would stop cheating people. Except that this rarely happens here, because companies know that law enforcement cares about systematic scam…

What country is this, if you don’t mind my asking?

It appears he lives in the Netherlands:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23862316

Based on the fact that I have also lived there, and looking at his comment history, I don’t think you can take this comment as being entirely accurate.

Re: How I Collected a Debt from an Unscrupulous Merchant

#92

Post by colechristensen »

sandermvanvliet wrote: post #77
colechristensen wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it’s a merchant, just use a credit card. Payment processors don’t like fraud, and it’s one phone call to report a disputed charge. Disputes come out of the merchants pocket and then their rates go up or they are dropped by the processor. You also benefit everyone else by finding and hurting the bad merchant.

I had quite a poor experience with this recently. Found out that there was a recurring charge from a website I had no relation with whatsoever, upon reporting this to my bank the answers were: - Contact the site (I had, got stonewalled) - No we can’t block that - Just block your card and ask for a new one Ultimately I got things resolved and money was paid back by the site because of relentless emailing and keeping f…

Maybe you were using the wrong language?

You shouldn't try to block transactions when something you never did shows up, you should report it as fraud. If they got your number, somebody else probably has it too. Trying to "block" probably got you put in the wrong pipeline.

Re: How I Collected a Debt from an Unscrupulous Merchant

#93

Post by hombre_fatal »

tleb_ wrote: post #84

I wonder if this post is to +1 his number of articles on the first page, to sell his HN video course: https://gumroad.com/l/htfphn/hacker

Seems like you're trying to be cynical, but it doesn't really fit.

The charge of putting a lot of work into an interesting article that HNers would upvote isn't very damning, and doing all of that just to increment 16 -> 17 in some marketing material isn't very convincing.

His own advice in the videos is "write good, interesting content" not some sort of gimmick.

Re: How I Collected a Debt from an Unscrupulous Merchant

#94

Post by sverhagen »

hydrogenbonds wrote: post #56

Given how much time you've wasted with this, my feeling is that overall you still lost. They owe you money for the time spent as well. Good on you for publishing this, but you should have mentioned their company name in the title, so that hopefully it show up in search engine results and this alerts others to not collaborate with them.

I looked at it the other way around. For a dispute of $88, to hang this company out to dry on Hacker News (they didn't know that would happen specifically, but still it was a public post), I didn't find very professional. You know, for all that talk about acting as a professional. Oh, well, acting...

Re: How I Collected a Debt from an Unscrupulous Merchant

#95

Post by 867-5309 »

locallost wrote: post #76
hydrogenbonds wrote: post #56

Given how much time you've wasted with this, my feeling is that overall you still lost. They owe you money for the time spent as well. Good on you for publishing this, but you should have mentioned their company name in the title, so that hopefully it show up in search engine results and this alerts others to not collaborate with them.

Passive income gets mentioned a lot here. He's collected over $100 for previous conversions and about $60 after that, and he'll keep collecting as long as the affiliate program runs. It's not a lot of money in general, but you don't start a keto blog with dreams of billions either.

$100 to billions is an unrealistic step, and an unfounded generalisation of the author's circumstances. in this day and age something as benign as an "influencer" mentioning the word "keto" could butterfly-ripple the author into an early retirement

Re: How I Collected a Debt from an Unscrupulous Merchant

#96

Post by jpcooper »

stickfigure wrote: post #42

Geez. This article was hard to follow but... it sounds like the merchant is really screwing up. My SaaS business gets most of our users via an affiliate program, and many years ago I worked in porn where nearly all of our users from an affiliate program. The #1 rule of affiliate programs is to treat affiliates like royalty. Or more accurately - business partners. Be clear about what you offer, be generous, and always…

What led you away from porn?

Re: How I Collected a Debt from an Unscrupulous Merchant

#97

Post by mtlynch »

Author here. Happy to answer any questions or take any feedback about this post.

I wrote it a few months ago and submitted it at the time[0], but it didn't seem like it was a match for HN. I was quite surprised when I woke up to find a tweet from a friend letting me know it was on the front page.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24144103

Re: How I Collected a Debt from an Unscrupulous Merchant

#98

Post by fourstar »

mtlynch wrote: post #97

Author here. Happy to answer any questions or take any feedback about this post. I wrote it a few months ago and submitted it at the time[0], but it didn't seem like it was a match for HN. I was quite surprised when I woke up to find a tweet from a friend letting me know it was on the front page. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24144103

It’s incredibly scattered. Like you just dumped whatever was on your mind and clicked publish and walked away.

Re: How I Collected a Debt from an Unscrupulous Merchant

#99

Post by remus »

greenkey wrote: post #74

I like this post but “unscrupulous merchant” seems harsh for a company that may have changed their policies and didn’t realize they had to inform the referring agent of those changes. It’s not uncommon for policies to change; that initial marketing spiel for bringing agents aboard doesn’t look like a contract. The reselling agent probably didn’t have a case here, and the merchant went out of their way to assist when…

> ...a company that may have changed their policies and didn’t realize they had to inform the referring agent of those changes.

Presumably the law varies depending on country, but in the UK you're absolutely obliged to inform any involved parties of substantial changes to the terms of any agreement you have with them. Deciding not to pay commission to affiliates on a flagship product is a pretty big change, if I was an affiliate I'd definitely want to know about it so I could reconsider my position.

Post reply on HN