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Comment by ben0x539 | Hacker News Reader

Also this is a great example of having rules that are bullshit enough that you can basically do anything to anyone and technically be perfectly justified according to some agreement, but also enforcing them arbitrarily enough that anyone who complains about the terms of the agreement will be brushed off as paranoid.

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Yeah, in my initial outburst of rage to my other half about the situation I just described it as it's like a company turning around and sacking you because you took home an expensive stapler several years ago, it's just a random get out of free card they have stored thanks to their ToS.

Abusive ToS won't stand up in court.

Not many people are big enough to sue PayPal, and if they are, they probably aren't using it.

Small claims court?

Srsly. This is the UK so it's well within the limits of small claims. IANAL but the U.K. also has less tolerance of "fine print".

If PayPal closed his account because it was created before he was 18, did they do so because they believe that he didn't have capacity when he signed up? If that is the case then it makes you wonder if any of the TOS apply

well in the UK and other Parts in Europe I'm not sure if this ToS is even legal. You don't need to full-aged to open an account at a bank. you only need to be legally competent in Europe and as far as I know Paypal is a recognized bank, so they can't just make their own rules via AGB/ToS.

I have heard of people doing something similar in the US with Google, who doesn't bother even contesting but just pays up because it's cheaper than sending a real lawyer. Which is no guarantee for PayPal and the U.K., but still, worth a try.

PayPal added a forced arbitration clause in 2012[0]. It seems likely that most PayPal users did not opt out and are now unable to sue PayPal.

[0] http://www.citizenvox.org/2012/10/15/opt-out-of-paypal%E2%80...

Edited for minor formatting.

Doesn't matter. That clause is invalid in most countries.

That may well be the case but forced arbitration clauses are legal in the US. There have been several recent Supreme Court cases that upheld mandatory arbitration clauses.

Here are some citations:

"American Express Co., et al. v. Italian Colors Restaurant." Oyez, https://www.oyez.org/cases/2012/12-133. Accessed 29 Apr. 2017.

"AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion." Oyez, https://www.oyez.org/cases/2010/09-893. Accessed 29 Apr. 2017.

"The End of Class Actions?" Arizona Law Review, http://arizonalawreview.org/fitzpatrick/

Gilles, Myriam and Friedman, Gary (2012) "After Class: Aggregate Litigation in the Wake of "AT&T Mobility v Concepcion"," University of Chicago Law Review: Vol. 79 : Iss. 2 , Article 3. Available at: http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclrev/vol79/iss2/3

Edited to add the third and fourth citations.

IIUC, those are cases of companies who put arbitration into a contract. That's a bit different then an average Joe hitting "ok" to an email that says the ToS of a website has changed. Arbitration can work for businesses which can negotiate and review contracts they agree too. No one reads or negotiates EULAs.

There is a difference between B2B and B2C contracts.

In most countries, arbitration clauses are prohibited in B2C contracts. You can't prohibit consumer from suing you.

Unless you have $10MM, I doubt you can afford to fight that without settling.

Without judgements, this bullshit will continue.

I feel like comments like this only serve to further downplay how abusive selective enforcement is. It can't be so bad if there's in theory a legal remedy available, right?

But whether you prevail in court or not, if you try to go through with that the whole thing is probably going to lose you a lot of time and cause you a shitton of stress, all at the whim of an arbitrary decision made by a company with, relatively speaking, no skin in the game. The power differential is immense. Realistically there's no legal recourse that can ward off the damage to your life that getting into that kind of one-sided slapfight could cause.

No, it would be like you're employer sacking you because you have a criminal record for something serious but you had put 'No criminal record' on your CV/resume when you applied.

PayPal had known for a decade that he signed up before he was 18 years old, but did nothing about it. At the time they closed his account, he was well over 18 years old so why would it matter?

Besides 'a criminal record' and 'signed up for a service a bit before you were eligible' are hardly comparable.

Exactly. It's actually not like the ticking "no criminal record", it's like putting down "yes, a minor conviction" and the employer saying "well that's fine" until ten years later they fire you for having a conviction.

It's ridiculous. There has to be an expiry on things like this. And the most ridiculous thing is that they are holding onto those monies.

I'd take them to the small claims court. In the UK we're not going to settle for this shit and if they want to operate here then they need to take their shoes off at the door and show some damn respect. This is a civilised country and we have rules.

Good day to you, sir.

How did they know that early that he'd signed up before turning 18? Didn't they only learn his birthdate when documentation was submitted?

As I understood the article, he only submitted documents after they'd already blocked his account.

Except juveniles can't commit a crime in the united states, so s/a criminal record/no criminal record/ and see how unfair you statements sounds

> No, it would be like you're employer sacking you because you have no criminal record for anything serious but you had put 'No criminal record' on your CV/resume when you applied.

Juveniles get tried and sentenced as adults literally all the time in the US.

That mostly depends on the child's race.

There is nothing 'arbitrary' about this. He committed financial fraud and got caught out when sending in documents.

He did not commit financial fraud. He might have broken a TOS, but bringing up financial fraud is just silly.

Honestly, in many jurisdictions (except for the punishment happy ones) being under certain age, ie. 18 or 17 automatically makes you non-persecutable for a lot of the "soft" offenses. So even if you tried to claim opening a PayPal account is a financial fraud, it would likely never stand up in court.

Actually an interesting question.

If the TOS includes the terms (1) you certify that all information provided to us is accurate (2) if you breach the TOS you must stop using the product and (3) you certify that you are over 18.

Then your continued use after age 18 may in fact signify entering a contract, even though you were under 18 when you signed. It also may not. Capacity/consideration/intent to be bound are really tricky in this case.

A far better response from PayPal would've been to return the money to Mat, explain the issue to their customer and request that they create a legal account.

If every company assumed that every person with a discretion to their name was an undesirable customer, virtually none of us would be customers of any company.

It also makes you an infant and unable to contract for anything other than legal employment and "necessaries" (except with a next friend). Language may change from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but the upshot is that an account created while underage would not be legally valid, and transactions for anything other than necessaries become revocable pretty much at will.

> It also makes you an infant

What?! No it doesn't. Infants are under one year of age. An older teenager has much more legal, financial, and criminal self-determination and responsibility than an infant does.

There's all kinds of weird and different rules/laws from country to country.

For example in my country (Germany): "Minors between 14 and 18 years are sentenced by juvenile justice. An adult between 18 and 21 years may still be sentenced by juvenile justice if considered mentally immature." [0]

This also means if the prosecution opens a court case against an individual that was less than 14 years of age at the time the crime was committed the criminal must be immediately dismissed although charges under private law can still be brought up (suing for damages etc.) and the parents can also possibly be sued for not supervising their children properly. [1]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_of_infancy

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicarious_liability

edit: formatting

Infant literally means someone younger than a year old though. The juvenile justice system that applies to teenagers is completely different, and does not apply to infants. Infants cannot be held liable for their actions at all because their brain isn't developed enough to know right from wrong, or really even what they're doing.

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