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Comment by kleinsch | Hacker News Reader

Freezing a card doesn’t mean the debt is erased. They can still take you to collections.

But it’s a difference to object their claims while you still have your money instead of being in debt while you try to get your money back

"your honor, they provided the credit card to prove their identity for the free plan and now we want to collect 100k"

And then they pull out the invoice where they prove without any doubt that you actually used pay-per-use services and ran up a 100k bill because you failed to do any sort of configuration.

I didn't use them, some bots did. Sort it out with them.

> I didn't use them, some bots did. Sort it out with them.

For you to put together this sort of argument with a straight face, you need to have little to no understanding of how the internet in general, services and web apps work. Good luck arguing your case with a judge.

Shrug. You give them a credit card for identity verification for a free tier. Amazon knows they don't stand a chance, so they always waive the bill "just this once". Won't even need to argue anything before a judge ;-)

I’ve not read the fine print but I’d be worried that there would be something in there that allows this.

There are light-years between what a company thinks their ToS “allow” and what a court would actually determine is allowed. Plenty of ToS clauses in major contracts are unenforceable by law.

In this situation if it were to actually go to court I’d expect the actual bill to get significantly reduced at the very least. But because it’s a completely bullshit charge based on bandwidth usage (which costs them nothing) it won’t go anywhere near that and will just get written off anyway.

Courts can be rather capricious, I’d rather avoid them as best as possible, even if you are likely to win having to fight something like this in court is punishing.

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