Man who created own credit card sues bank for not sticking to terms (2013)

In this case its reasonable to suggest that by submitting his altered contract without drawing the banks attention (e.g. by putting at the front "here are my proposed terms") then not only does the bank not have to abide by them, but he was guilty of deception by trying to trick the bank into signing up to them.

Normally these rules are used to protect consumers from fine print proffered by suppliers. For instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interfoto_Picture_Library_Ltd_... established that unusual or onerous terms cannot be hidden in a page of fine print and still be enforceable. But the rules apply the other way around too.

Less extreme is reprinting contract to look as close as possible to the original but with added extremely one sided terms. It's debatable how much that side intended for those new terms to be overlooked.

Life is a spectrum. That is why we have courts to argue where on that spectrum a particular example lies.

Contracts aren't deals with the devil. They are never meant to support "haha I tricked you now you are fucked" deals. They are legal support for an agreement between two cognizant and willing participants. Further more, at least in US, unsophisticated parties are protected from contracting away certain rights and from contracts which are wholly one-sided.

Edit: abonnement -> subscription, thanks to @taejo.

However, he felt his life was under threat, which may have helped the bank's negotiating power - after all, it is Russia. https://www.rt.com/business/tinkoff-bank-agarkov-credit-299/

A good example of why you should be sure your country is a safe place for contract disputes to be dealt with by the courts and not by men with ski masks and AK47s.

So the problem is obviously there, and believe it or not, even among the least tech-savvy everybody is aware of this problem, how it's done, and current methods to minimize it. It's very important. For example, look at Vitol, the biggest energy trading house in the world (followed by Glencore and Trafigura, both split from the same company). This doesn't include metals or ags. Vitol has $300 billion or so in revenue per year. Strictly looking at their trading business, and considering minimum wholesale volumes around 25,000 barrel lots (barge sizes in the Gulf Coast), so wholesale crude and products trades in blocks worth between $1.5 and $2 million at today's prices. While this is an extremely simplified, ballpark analysis, assuming their trading business has a 2% net margin, they're selling $300 billion that they bought for $294 billion. Roughly, that's about 300,000 transactions for separate, physical movements of petroleum and products. Saving even a few days on payment terms across the board would mean they have to borrow money for a few less days, which would add up to millions of dollars in cash savings that begin to accrue immediately and continue to daily over time.

So, again, the problem is there, and various groups have attempted to build software (which actually did work, technically). The big problem is that implementation of these tools has been tried in areas such as Letters of Credit (negotiation between counterparties and banks for each one if doing transactional trade finance) and the rest of trade finance. The problem isn't the tools, it's that the companies kind of like to play this game, because if you see yourself as on the more sophisticated end of the market then this benefits you, and this system is tried and true, whereas the new system could be prone to errors or other unknown unknowns, where they don't know how to protect themselves.

edit: By the way, much of the above (especially as it concerns the individual specifications of each order, either physical variables in the commodities markets or financial variables in the bond and derivatives markets) is exactly the reason implementation of more streamlined alternatives for clearing and settlement have been so slow. It's not that the technology for actually doing it isn't there, it's that the bottlenecks leading up to that are still there. So if you have a good way for traders to automatically decide which fees and costs apply when and to who, please do tell, but then you've effectively automated the traders, as much of what they do is negotiating those terms.

I'd say if a contract is so long and convoluted that the drafting party can't be bothered to manually verify it's still valid when returned, they have no business drafting that contract in the first place. After all, it's hardly reasonable to assume the other party read it, apparently.