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Comment by melissalobos | Hacker News Reader

At least the plugin guy was reasonable-ish. That does sounds like a really odd experience. It does pay to always check all of the dependencies you are using and their terms. When I was younger I got hit by limits when using a free tier of a service, but they just throttled us which lost us users.

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The plugin guy can afford to be reasonable-ish. It reduces the likelihood of the scam being publicly disclosed, and I'd wager that 99% of people never notice the plugin is doing this.

How is it a “scam” if the terms are clearly posted?

EDIT: The percentage increase from 2% to 30% was not posted; I withdraw my opinion on that.

The "30% markup if our algorithm thinks you're doing something sneaky" was not disclosed.

True, it was not. I concede this point.

2% was clearly posted. Yet the plugin was taking 30%.

Huge red flag: they offer you some money back in hopes you don't turn them into the "authorities".

Wouldn’t not offering any money back be an even bigger red flag?

That's how settlements work, yes.

Is it though? A settlement in a civil case is money in exchange for not pursuing further civil legal action.

A situation of "we're giving you money so that you don't report a crime" (which is implied by "turning in to the authorities") is more like extortion/bribery than it is a settlement.

The terms are not clearly stated, the explicit LICENSE document https://github.com/floatinghotpot/cordova-admob-pro/blob/mas... offers a standard MIT license, unlike the wiki description.

The license states how you may use the code, not what the code does.

Oh come on, it's not a scam and he's not stealing anything. It's clearly mentioned on the license and it's up to the users to go through it (like any other open-source plugin or software they use). At the end of the day the plugin creator was polite, understanding and returned money back even though he was not obliged to do so. It's a win-win situation as they clearly describe it, but the OP wasn't satisfied with the high (30%) percentage.

The plugin was secretly taking 15x what it claimed to.

The ease with which a (substantial!) refund was offered makes me think it wasn't an isolated incident.

> the OP wasn't satisfied with the high (30%) percentage.

The OP was never informed of the high percentage!

How is hiding 2% in your wiki (instead of in LICENSE where it belongs), and then taking 30% instead of 2%, not a scam? If someone listed a price of $2 for a burrito and then charged you $30 at the register, you would not consider that OK.

They did consider it thousands of time, they just didn't supervise what their worker agreed to

It looks to me that the plugin author isn't only trying to get the money he's owed from people who are trying to scam him. Which still isn't a great thing, especially since it can happen mistakenly, but it's at least a little more understandable.

In any scam there's a part where you cool off the mark so as to not have them go squealing to the cops. Maybe you give 'em some money back, maybe you teach them the lesson of how to bounce back after a loss. Google "cooling the mark out" to read some academic research on this.

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