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Comment by emacsen | Hacker News Reader

I don't know what happened in this situation, but generally refunding money for TOS violations is a bad idea. Let me explain why.

Imagine that Alice runs a service where you can send people greeting cards.

Bob decides he's going to use this service to cause trouble and instead of normal greeting cards, he sends people messages with hate speech, such as their race, their religion, says he hoped they get cancer, and so on.

Alice sees Bob is doing this and it violates her TOS on the service, so she cancels his account.

Should Bob get a refund?

If he does, then Bob will have used Alice's system to do bad things in a way that actually costs him nothing. He's costing Alice administrative fees and regular costs.

That's why ToS violations should generally not trigger a refund.

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> Should Bob get a refund?

Yes - Bob should be returned a pro-rated amount based on the amount time he originally paid to use the service for and the day his account was terminated.

EX: If Bob paid for a month, and Alice cancels him on day 5, Bob should be refunded approx: (30 - 5)/30 * (Cost of subscription).

You do not get to charge people for a service you are no longer providing them.

You're NOT refunding him, you're terminating the contract that allowed you to charge him in the first place. So you bill for time used and return the rest.

Generally refunding money for TOS violations should be mandatory, and failing to do so should have a default assumption of fraud on the part of the provider. Let me explain why.

Imagine that Alice purports to run a service where you can send people greeting cards. Bob decides that he's going to use this service to send greeting cards. Alice takes Bob's money, and never sends any greeting cards. When Bob asks why the greeting cards weren't sent, Alice claims a TOS violation and cancels Bob's account. In some cases, Alice may not even provide sufficient information to dispute a claim, such as when Alice's own proprietary anti-fraud or anti-cheat algorithms have a false positive.

Should Bob get a refund? If he doesn't, Alice has no incentive to provide the actual service or to avoid false-positives. She's costing Bob the subscription fees, but can unilaterally decide whether or not to provide the agreed-upon service.

That's why TOS violations should always trigger a refund.

That's not how cancellations for subscriptions or refunds for services work though. If Bob has paid Alice to send cards, and she has sent them, then obviously no refund is necessary. Alice just needs to ban Bob from using the service again.

In the case of Tinder banning someone, they should automatically cancel the subscription because the customer no longer have access to what they're paying for, and if there's a part of a month left they should refund the value of that. Companies should not be allowed to issue 'punishment' to customers. That's what the criminal justice system is for.

This is not a hard problem. Companies should only charge for the service they provide, and if they choose to withdraw that service they shouldn't take any money for what the user can't use.

> Companies should not be allowed to issue 'punishment' to customers.

Why not? Contracts with penalties are very common.

Subscriptions should be cancelled when an account is banned but it's not obvious to me why there should be a refund. Subscription services usually don't allow for partial refunds when you cancel. If you force companies to refund in case of a ban, you need to force them to allow cancellation at any time with the same refund.

So let me get this straight.

You think a contract where one party can unilaterally cancel, present no evidence to anyone, and keep the money paid is somehow fair and just?

It goes both ways-- do we think a contract with a fixed guaranteed term can be canceled with refund simply because the consumer decided to violate the terms of service?

This is what courts are for, and the fact they aren't involved here is the basic problem.

They should be forced to show exactly why a user is banned. This bullshit about "we don't want to let bad actors game the system" is getting old.

When TOSs can have any looney language in them and are by definition adhesion contracts, I don't see them as particularly sacrosant.

There is a chance that Bob might be on the hook for hate crimes or harassment - but that isn't Alice's call. Alice should prorate the cost of service usage to the terms of use[1]. If Alice believes Bob might have violated a law during his usage of her service she is absolutely free to report that violation to relevant authorities. Alice has the right to refuse service to Bob for a wide variety of reasons - but it isn't Alice's place to serve punishment to Bob based on a moral judgement of his usage once he ceases to be a client.

1. If Alice expected users to send 2 cards a day and charges a per day rate appropriate to that usage and Bob floods her with 1000 requests a day for a week then that mistake is wholly on her. If you have a per use cost and you charge per day you need to add some kind of rate limiting.

> I don't know what happened in this situation, but generally refunding money for TOS violations is a bad idea.

You can learn the article and learn what happened. We are not talking about things in general, but about this particular situation. Basically, it's pure theft. But since the amount is so low, nobody will sue them. In this way they can scam thousands of people and go unpunished.

There's nothing in the article indicating why he was banned. They say he violated the ToS. He says he didn't. Maybe it was a false positive, but we don't have enough information to know what happened.

The right to remain silent is a vital right in criminal court cases, but certainly doesn't apply to our own conclusions. Consider that only Tinder has records indicating whether there was a ToS violation, and what that violation was. Tinder is not releasing those records. Tinder has a financial incentive to claim that there is a ToS violation. Putting those three items together isn't proof that Tinder is lying, but is evidence in that direction.

How do you know the blog author doesn't have evidence of a ToS violation (that they're not sharing)? Similar incentives to shade the story exist on both sides, I think.

I trust that tinder has an incentive to steal money to a greater extent than blog author has an incentive to get internet points.

I think you underestimate what people will do for internet points.

The blog author isn't the one who stated a tos occured. The company would need to provide proof. The author could refute that with their own data afterwards.

If someone says you stole something should we ask you for proof that you did and if you fail to provide proof should we say you are being shady by not answering?

Chargebacks are a thing, and they do punish bad actors.

Thing is, you probably don't want to chargeback in this scenario because the app charges through Apple's billing system.

That’s even easier. Contact Apple and ask for a refund.

Then at least cancel his subscription.

I can imagine a scenario where you need to login to cancel your subscription, but can't login because your banned. A while back Tinder was trying to bypass the Google Play subscription system so this is very possible.

They did if he signed up from Tinder.com. Not cancelling is if he subscribed via Play/App Store which presumably they have no control of on their side?

You can cancel user subscriptions through Play Store, but not through App Store. Yet another way that Apple is truly terrible to developers.

And file a chargeback request with the credit card company - service paid for but not received. The "customer is always right" in this scenario (speaking as someone who has an Internet based business that accepts credit card payments). As long as you don't make a habit of doing it, you'll get your money back.

You're not wrong, but you'd better not have false positives.

In particular, it seems likely the author in this case got caught by an algorithmic badness detector or may have violated the TOS in some minor technical way rather than being abusive. I'm counting the latter as a false positive in this case; that's no way to treat a paying customer. People who know what they did don't usually blog about getting banned and post it to HN.

Chargebacks are an effective way to punish companies for this behavior.

Bob should certainly get a refund, prorated with reasonable costs for the actual services. In case service costs are spread over time and many users (i.e. you sell subscriptions to a service that costs $TONS_OF_MONEY to set up but almost nothing to maintain) some reasonable part can be charged - e.g. a monthly subscription cost - but charging beyond that, or maintaining subscription indefinitely, certainly would not be reasonable. Bob being an asshole and doing bad things is not relevant here - you can't legally rob assholes. You can refuse to do business with them, but that's it, otherwise the assholes have the same rights as everybody else.

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