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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

Suggest Law: If a company's electronic notification to you is so phishy that a "reasonable man" would have obvious cause to doubt its legitimacy, then all financial and legal consequences of ignoring it are on the sender.

Edit: "sender" here refers to the sender of the electronic notification.

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Any time the law sets things like "reasonable" it's a quagmire.

For every utterance of "reasonable" in law you can be sure over $1B of laywer fees have been (or will be) spent.

True, to a degree. But let's imagine that (1) FedEx felt that profits were more desirable than legal expenses, and (2) FedEx had some power over the sending and contents of the notifications. Might FedEx decide to start following well-regarded standards for writing and sending legit-looking electronic notifications? And iterate from there, as an ongoing strategy?

I think the answer here is "don't do things that are borderline (un)reasonable"

Could just shorten it to: “Don’t be a di*”

You can spend as much as lawyer money as you want on arguing whatever nonsense you want, reasonableness is a common standard so sure, people will have spent lots of money pointlessly arguing about it but that's not a problem with reasonableness.

Sometimes the arguers win and set a new precedent... so it definitely creates a new problem with everyone who subsequently encounters the issue.

Sure, I'm certainly not going to pretend this is perfect, but it seems to be working basically fine and I don't see "reasonableness" - which actually avoids a lot of wrangling - as a problem.

Compare Legal Tender against an ordinary Reasonableness test. Legal Tender says that I only have to accept payment of your debt in specific forms (the "Legal Tender") and I can refuse to accept other payment.

So maybe our currency is Doodads, the Legal Tender law specifies that the 10 and 50 Doodad Coins shall be Legal Tender, and you owe me 15000 Doodads. You try to pay by card, I refuse. You try to write a cheque, I refuse. You try to pay with 150 of the 100 Doodad Coins, but again I refuse. Eventually I take you to court and... I win?! You did not pay your debt in the required Legal Tender.

With Reasonableness the court might buy that it was OK to refuse to accept the card (maybe I don't have a merchant account) and maybe even the cheque too (but already by then I expect a judge to have a lot of questions about how I thought you would pay and I'd better have a really good answer) but the 100 Doodad Coins are clearly money, with Reasonableness as our standard it's obvious that I lose my case, there's no need to write a law saying "Yeah duh, the 100 Doodad Coin is money" because a reasonable person can see that.

I almost got in some trouble because of that. A "bank" I wasn't a customer of kept sending me messages about "urgent, answer this form with your personal details or we will lock your account". Seemed quite scammy to me.

Then I later got a physical letter in the mail about the same, and then I called the bank. Apparently I had some account there holding some pension stuff from a previous employer. Shrugs.

In this case the consequence is that the Australian government agency collecting the import tax doesn't get paid. Which means that they don't release the package to FedEx, and that you don't get your package.

FedEx needs to do a better job with these notifications. At the very least they need to hire a copywriter.

Our local FedEx once asked me for my details so they could be able to declare my package to the customs and in the SMS message they said that "The sender is paying all declaration fees." I sent them my info and got my package.

Then about five months later, I got a bill from FedEx for import fees, tax and service charges. Had to fight with FedEx for some time about it but eventually they agreed to void the bill. At this point in time, I have no idea if I paid the taxes when I bought the stuff, if FedEx paid them out of pocket or if the sender paid them out of pocket.

There are more possible realities. You listed the 3 first. There are more options, at least these:

4. You paid the taxes when you bought the stuff. Fedex wants the taxes anyways. They would have kept your extra taxes for themselves in the end.

5. You paid the taxes when you bought the stuff. Fedex wants the taxes anyways. They would have paid the extra taxes. The government kept them because, hey, they trust Fedex.

6. You paid the taxes when you bought the stuff. Fedex wants the taxes anyways. They would have paid the extra taxes. The government kept them but eventually returned them, because some kind of accounting kicked in.

7. You didn't pay the taxes when you bought the stuff. The sender didn't either. Fedex informs the sender and you. Fedex pays out of pocket. The sender pays out of pocket.

Could have happened if you paid:

8. You didn't pay the taxes when you bought the stuff. The sender didn't either. Fedex informs the sender and you. Fedex pays out of pocket. The sender pays out of pocket. You pay out of pocket. Fedex keeps twice the taxes in the end.

9. You didn't pay the taxes when you bought the stuff. The sender didn't either. Fedex informs the sender and you. Fedex pays out of pocket. The sender pays out of pocket. You pay out of pocket. The fed. governemnt keeps triple the taxes.

And many variations I can't think of right now.

I mean, either I paid the taxes when I bought the stuff, or I didn't. There's no reality where I "didn't pay the taxes when [I] bought the stuff" and also I "pay out of pocket", since I have not paid anything after placing the order. I guess there's also the possibility that I paid for the taxes but the seller ended up pocketing them, with FedEx footing the bill.

Sorry, I was unclear.

I mean in the general case - how much does FedEx win or loose from problems like this?

If they win, do they exploit it, by design or incompetence?

> then all financial and legal consequences of ignoring it are on the sender.

They are, since non compliance will either result in destruction of the package or sending it back (differs a bit per country and type of goods).

It's a bit sad there are no easy ways to prepay taxes and it's hit or miss if you get checked. I'm glad the EU figured it out and have almost no weird surprises any more, except from the Uniteds (states and kingdom).

The management will overreact by implementing 100-factor authentication, requiring 30 letter password with mandatory Unicode symbols

A bunch of extra authentication factors and a password sure sounds like phishing for sensitive PII to me.

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