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Comment by notsuoh | Hacker News Reader

It's some trouble, but a quick filing in your local small claims court for the $700 would be an interesting way to get your money back and see how it plays out.

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In a dream world: find a law firm that buys the class action from you. Given their market share and the amount in question, it should be a profitable affair.

Meta-idea: create a startup that functions as a marketplace for bringing together ideas for class action lawsuits and law firms.

The problem is that his likely payout on that lawsuit would be about 30 bucks.

You may be in interested in the domain of litigation finance then: https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/17/this-young-litigation-fina...

Not quite the same thing as what you mentioned, but by creating financing that evaluates cases by their potential for a payoff, this should seed the kind of marketplace you mentioned.

Wouldn't they just not show up, and pay the $700 charge?

Sounds like a win then.

How do you collect from a foreign company? If they don’t have a local presence, there’s no way to get the money.

TeamViewer appears to have a US presence (and likely, assets worth at least $700 plus small claims costs for seizure by the Pinellas County sheriff’s dept) in Clearwater, FL. Probably not local to OP, but more local than Germany (where TeamViewer is HQd).

Most likely. And in any case, most small claims courts don't allow the representation by counsel, and as such they're more lenient about complaints submitted. File, serve Team Viewer, show up on day of, collect default judgment or argue why lifetime means lifetime.

That's infuriating because even in this "success" case, the company won. The user lost in at least the following ways

* going down the wrong back and having to do a U-turn

* spending the physical time and labor to organize, and to go to court (just this might be over 700$ of time for some people)

Don't you get to go to court virtually nowadays ... probably using competing software :)

Good luck getting a judgement, TeamViewer is a German startup company. You'll have to sue them here.

That's not correct, they have a US presence and sell in the US. You can't be judgment proof just by headquartering in another country, any US assets can be seized to cover judgment amount. Take the judgment to the sheriff and they will literally go seize assets for you to cover judgment.

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