Hacker News Reader

Comment by stefan_ | Hacker News Reader

This is such a big thing nowadays and it needs regulation. Dispute a charge on Steam? Banned for life. Return one too many item according to some neural network on Amazon? Banned for life. Do nothing wrong at all? Random chance to wake up to a banned Google account, no recourse. Your business runs on GCP? Bad luck.

There need to be serious consequences for this "the computer made a mistake" bullshit.

View on HN

Disputing charges with a credit card is an interesting thing. It's a consumer being able to unilaterally say "give me my money back" and the merchant basically being stuck with the tab. Doing a chargeback means the relationship between consumer and merchant is ineffective that they can't resolve their differences normally. That the merchant doesn't want to risk more money on serving such a customer in the future is perfectly rational.

Rational? Maybe for them. But when they refuse to help the consumer, it’s the customer’s right to issue a chargeback. That’s their purpose: to deal with bad merchants. Too many chargebacks can get you dropped from your payment processor. But when the merchant bans you to hide the fact that they suck (from the processor), that’s pretty messed up.

Assuming the merchant is 100% honest and accurate, yes this is rational. If the merchant is error-prone and doesn't want their occasional erroneous (or intentional) overcharges affecting their relationship with credit services, it's also rational.

maybe if chargebacks are so bad try to invest in better dispute resoluton processes

The credit card company is the one that holds the power I guess. I wonder if someday visa will start threatening merchants who retaliate via bans as an extra card feature.

Previously, Visa(?) had tried to prevent merchants from having separate cash and debit/credit prices (gas stations for example), and they got in trouble with “monopoly laws”. So I wouldn’t hold my breath on them retaliating on merchants who ban customers.

I hate having to dispute charges with the CC company because I don’t like the idea that the merchant gets stuck with the bill, but I have done it on a few occasions where I felt like I had absolutely no recourse. I recently had to do this with one of those gigantic furniture warehouse places. I paid full retail price + delivery and setup changes for a bed. The guys came and set up the bed, but it had some greasy smudges all over the headboard and some other ones issues I can’t recall, so I called to complain and they basically gave me the runaround and said there’s nothing we can do because I didn’t reject the item right away and that it was only cosmetic. I wasted my time begging and pleading with store management and their customer satisfaction department, but there was never any real resolution. In the end they offered me a $100 gift certificate towards my next purchase. I felt insulted and exhausted at that point and kindly informed them that I would be doing a chargeback. “ok”, they said. The next day I got a credit for the full cost, which IIRC was about $900. I honestly felt horrible for doing that because I essentially got the bed free. I suppose the company’s policies simply didn’t allow them to actually do the right thing and fix or replace the bed. Perhaps it was simply less costly for them to eat the coat of a chargeback instead of paying someone to fix the problem or replace it due to labor and other costs.

Some of the chargebacks get eaten by the merchant, and some get eaten by the credit card company’s “satisfaction guarantee” (which is accounted as a form of insurance).

> It's a consumer being able to unilaterally say "give me my money back" and the merchant basically being stuck with the tab.

The merchant is stuck with more than the tab. There's also a chargeback fee, which can range from around $15 to several times that depending on who they use for payment processing.

> Doing a chargeback means the relationship between consumer and merchant is ineffective that they can't resolve their differences normally.

Sometimes it means that the customer didn't even try to resolve the dispute. At one place I worked we always gave a refund when one was requested, with no hassle. Some customers, though, would not ask. They would go straight to chargeback.

I think that because some companies make it a major hassle to get them to issue a refund, some consumers try to do a chargeback first and only call the merchant if the bank requires them to try to settle the issue directly first.

> Some customers, though, would not ask. They would go straight to chargeback.

I was always under the impression that if consumers did this sort of thing too often it would end up hurting them because the CC company would start to flag their account.

Sort of an algorithmic version of "If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole."

Merchants can appeal. And if they do, you can be out of luck - they can lie that they did provide you with a service, and you won’t have access to any of their statements to respond to them. It’s many months long process but possible.

Source - happened to me. Ended up relationship with both the merchant and credit card company. And have $2k less in my wallet.

No this actually puts the merchant and customer on equal footing. The card company has an incentive to please both sides.

It's not a guaranteed refund. It's just another dispute resolution, but done by the card issuer rather than the merchant.

Often they will side with the consumer and will refund the charges through their various policies, but they also investigate the case and will let the payment go through if there's no actual problem found. There are plenty of cases where consumers didn't even contact the merchant at all and yet still chargeback.

I think most chargebacks are by fraudsters and carderz.

> It's a consumer being able to unilaterally say "give me my money back"

That is actually not true. The credit card company must follow established guidelines and pragmatically look at the available information/user agreement/contract and decide on whether there was a breach of contract. They can not blindly stick the bill to the business.

> It's a consumer being able to unilaterally say "give me my money back" and the merchant basically being stuck with the tab.

That's not even remotely true. The merchant absolutely has the ability to dispute chargebacks.

Yes, but the bank takes the money immediately after accepting the chargeback. The merchant can provide evidence and dispute it to get their money back, but it is immediately withdrawn. And, if I’m remembering correctly, along with a fee.

It certainly feels illegal to have the threat of a ban when you make a good faith report of fraudulent charges. A business could have a pattern of deliberate overcharges that they layer in with regular transactions with the knowledge that enough users will just give in and eat the fraudulent charge to avoid losing access to the service. If the business has run the numbers and found that it's a net gain in profits from this practice, there would be a reasonable (if completely corrupt) motive for operating the scam.

Regarding the dead sibling comment, it's never RICO.

https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-...

As these systems become monopolies - or at least defacto standards - these blanket bans without insight into the process, appeal, or even notification is getting ugly.

Right now, it's "only" a frustration in most cases but what happens when Amazon bans you while PillPack is how you receive your meds?

Sounds like the movie Brazil to me. Or Computers Don't Argue.

“Your business runs on GCP? Bad luck.”

Luck has nothing to do with it. That’s bad planning. Really bad.

The “Does your business run on GCP?” needs to be understood by every VP out there. If you are a software company, and a _cough_ security company, that’s all in on GCP, you don’t know what you are doing.

Can you say more? The risk of account locks seems very similar on any of the major cloud providers? A brief search shows similar complaints on AWS, for example.

Indeed. AWS has kicked customers off too. Never said they didn’t. I’ve heard more stories from people getting booted from GCP than AWS. By order of 10x it seems like. I’m sure someone’s been kicked off Azure too. Hybrid cloud with some on-prem backup solution is the only way to truly be cloud agnostic and protect yourself and your data from deletion due to a variety of issues. GCP kicked off a game developer (and deleted his data). AWS kicked off Parler. What I’m saying is that if you’re a VP in charge of cloud strategy, make sure you have a solid DR plan should you intentionally or unintentionally run afoul of that providers rules. Either from policy or politically. Doesn’t matter. GCP just has more of a track record in my news feed of deplatforming than AWS.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/terraria-developer-c...

> What I’m saying is that if you’re a VP in charge of cloud strategy, make sure you have a solid DR plan should you intentionally or unintentionally run afoul of that providers rules.

Really all you need is a mediocre Plan A: don't run afoul of the providers' rules. It's not hard. AWS hosts a lot of content that's even more offensive than Parler, the thing that got Parler in trouble was they weren't able or willing to act on Amazon's demand that they promptly remove content that encouraged or incited violence. So if you're running a platform that hosts content like that, or you're breaking the law or generally breaking the pretty straightforward rules, yeah, have a Plan B, C and D ready to go at a moment's notice. Most of us aren't running things that cater to people who are into political violence or other liability-causing activities so it's not a thing we need to spend a lot of time and money planning for.

Only exception to this rule would be GCP or any other company that's widely known for atrocious service and capricious, random bans.

That's fair. In my news feed, this is mostly an issue for independent developers than companies (all providers). We are a startup (year and change old) and we have human contacts in GCP. And not because we have personal connections in GCP teams. GCP reached out to us, we have had a few calls and so on, like any normal vendor. Our experience has been totally contrary to what I hear from independent developers.

If you can get a signed enterprise agreement it's not as bad. I would do the same if I was on AWS (in fact, we did at the company I worked for) or Azure. My news feeds have a horror story every few months from someone getting locked out/banned/deleted from GCP though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com