I ended up in the same situation with my restaurant business. Personal Facebook account was suspended (which hadn't been used for anything except buying ads for mentioned business for something like ~4 years), and I guess because of that, the professional Instagram account linked with the personal Facebook was also suspended.
I had ads running and tried for ~2 weeks to do anything about it, but Facebook kept charging me and I kept being unable to resolve it by any manner at all. Eventually reached a real human via Facebook support somehow, and they said there was nothing they could do.
Had to lock and block my card for the charges to stop. Wrote to my bank about them charging me even though I was suspended, I got all the money back from the day the suspension started (took screenshots from day one it happened) and I'll never use anything related to Facebook again.
So I guess my advise is to lock the card, ask your bank nicely and if the bank won't help you, take it to court. Not sure what country you are in, but usually there are organizations that help you pro-bono for easy cases like this when huge companies try to take advantage of the small person, often leading to something called "small claims court".
Sounds like class action lawsuit material. Even if they have an arbitration clause, the contract likely ended when the account was suspended. Continuing to charge the card after the fact thus would NOT be covered by arbitration unless the contract explicitly covers this (unlikely). This is assuming you sue over the fraudulent charges and not to restore the account. The second you try to restore the account the original contract would be valid.
Just my educated guess at least. IANAL, but I've participated in lawsuits and I have studied law and read tons of case law (had my development career not taken off I would have absolutely become a lawyer...and I still might). I would welcome for an actual lawyer to pitch in, however.
Also sounds like it would be appropriate to write to your state's Attorney General, maybe of several states. This is exactly the kind of widespread low-grade fraud that is suitable for them to pursue (much more legal overhead than worth it to each victim, but creating large damages in aggregate).
All class action lawsuits have a named plaintiff that represents the class, and gets more of the settlement than the rest (how much is totally up to the agreement with the law firm).
But in this particular case, a letter from a lawyer outlining some specific laws/contracts that FB is violating will get them to stop immediately.
Keep in mind getting more of the settlement might still not mean much. I was the class representative for a class action against Sharp and I got…$1,000.
Woo. The process was interesting, so there’s that. It does also take up quite a bit of time. I definitely got less than minimum wage.
Sounds like something someone could do, yeah. But luckily the bank was understanding and gave me my money back, and I can't justify spending the time on trying to make things right with a party (Facebook) that has absolutely no will do make things right.
It will absolutely get their attention and get your issue in front of a real person who will have the organizational power to fix it.
A cheaper way to do the same thing is to fedex a business letter written in formal english, citing dates and times you tried to resolve the situation and that your next step is to file a legal complaint.
It should be just as effective but it will save you the small claims filing fees.
I’ve actually had very good luck with filling out the small claims court document as if I’m suing the person and then mailing a copy of the document to them with a note that says, “Filing this on Monday unless I hear from you by xxx”.
Form letters happen to be one of ChatGPT's more-underrated areas of utility.
"Write a legal demand letter to Facebook about..."
Verify any addresses and don't let it cite law, but sometimes it can help articulate what your grievance even is better than you can (by putting a name to it in some cases). Aggrieved parties are seldom as coherent as they could be.
>I wrote a letter twice, and sent in the mail via postage, with tracking, which was delivered, to cancel my Ad services and provide a refund. No response however.
You don’t specify where you are but if you’re in the UK, use the free small claims process [1]. No lawyers, no expenses, pre-trail hearing with a judge (over the phone), and then a trial if the judge decides it has legal legs.
I’ve used it before and it’s very effective. They will send a letter to Facebook on your behalf (with all the court’s crown logos on the letterhead, etc), they must respond or end up in court.
Small Claims is effective, but if you win - and you probably will - there's no guarantee that a company the size of Facebook will care. This has been a common problem for people suing airlines which ignore legal obligations to pay out under compensation law.
So you'll have to go to court again for an enforcement order.
If you get one of those you can send bailiffs in to take stuff and sell it on your behalf. But it's starting to get expensive at this point.
Although it will probably get FB's attention, especially if someone from the press just happens to be there to take photos when the bailiffs go in.
Correct - if you're enforcing a judgment in the UK, the cost of doing so gets paid by the defendant. The bailiffs will handle this themselves by seizing enough to cover the judgment amounts and their own costs.
Once you have an order to enforce the judgement your bailiffs can walk into the Facebook's London office and start removing property and nobody will be able to stop them.
"He then applied for bailiffs who attended the Wizz Air desk at Luton Airport - saying they could take goods including chairs, tables, computers or an even aircraft."
It's worth going in, if you're going in out of spite:
> On June 3, Nyerges, two sheriff's deputies and a moving truck showed up at the local BofA branch. The deputies informed the manager that he could either pay the Nyerges' legal fees— $2,500—or the movers would start taking away the bank's furniture and cash. The manager, after conferring with his superiors, gave the deputies a check.
> The following browsers have been confirmed as being fully compatible with MCOL;
• Internet Explorer version 6, 7 8 and 9
• Firefox version 3
• Opera version 9
• Safari version 5
• Chrome version 9
I didn't get to the trial stage the two times I've used it, so I am not sure, but I would assume so. The first time the letter from HM Courts was enough to put the shits up the defendant (which is I think the biggest value of this for small claims against 'small' parties); the second time I got to the pre-trial phone-call with the judge, he said "Yep, there's enough here to go to trial", and then the defendant backed down.
I'd be very surprised if many of these go to the final trial phase. It's nearly never worth the effort of doing so for the defendant, just pay up and not risk having a county court judgement around your neck.
You should exhaust your administrative remedies first. Go through your bank and through facebook. For your bank a chargeback, read the specific terms, it sounds like services not received would apply if you are unable to access the services. Presumably facebook is not continuing to run the ads if the account was banned. Eliott has some good contact info for executive customer service as you have already contacted them the normal way.
Failing that it costs around $100 to file in small claims and serve the defendant, if you lose you are out that money, plus the time. If you win the fee is included in the judgement is almost every state. The process is to find the registered agent to name in the lawsuit, file the case with the clerk where the defendant is located and pay the fees, serve the defendant and have proof of service. Most likely they will negotiate a settlement and it would end there, before going to court. If you can't agree you go to small claims and either travel in person or appear by teleconference. Make your case with the judge and prove all the elements required for your type of case, it isn't super formal though. If you win and get a judgement and either they pay or you go to the sheriffs to collect.
In the county I live in I think the court fees are $250, plus service (Sheriff charges another $250 if you use them).
Most judges will look at you crazy if your suit is for the same as the filing fees. I've been told I can't file a suit for less than the fees, but my fees are always zero as our county courts don't charge indigents. I often file suits just to vindicate my rights. I once won a case I filed for $1.81.
Interesting. I have contemplated spending more on court fees than what would be my potential remedy, just for principle alone. I think that justice itself has value.
IF you have the money, it's worth talking to a lawyer; because if you do things right you can often get "legal fees" awarded as part of "company is big dumb and pisses off the judge". But you have to do it right to get those.
> I tried contacting my credit card company, but FB uses a different vendor account for each bill posted, making it difficult for the credit card company to stop these transactions.
Another option might be to have the credit card company handle thing as if you had fraud on the card. Cancel the card, issue you an new number, and -- critically, you will have to specifically ask them to do this -- do not automatically update billers with an existing relationship with the new number/authorization for you.
Assuming this works correctly (it may not), FB will be unable to bill you for the ad spend. The downside of this is that they may send these debts to collections at some point, which could hurt your credit rating and be a problem for other reasons.
Somewhat related - my wife and I own a small business and Yelp basically forced us into a $150 a month advertising package by deleting all out positive reviews and posting bogus negative reviews (they were by people not even locate in our state). At the time we were new so this was a big deal.
We went along with it but at some point our card expired and I never updated my account with them. I tracked it for a few months to ensure they weren’t accumulating, once that proved true I never thought about them again and mark their invoices as spam. Going on a year plus and it’s continued to work; we don’t pay them a dime, our few positive reviews we get at yelp remain online and we encourage our customers to avoid them and post everywhere else.
Have you confirmed that their charges aren't still showing up on your credit card statement? Merchants collecting recurring payments use updater services to update expiration dates automatically.
FYI small claims courts are limited -- in NY, for example, I'm fairly sure small claims can provide equitable relief but not punitive or injunctive (pay back money, but can't give you a penalty or force FB to do something).
In practice it doesn't matter (you just need to get their attention + they will fix). Depending on FB's TOS, they may try to move you to arbitration, though once again, you don't care, you just want to get expert attention.
Maybe read the TOS before filing -- you might be able to trigger arbitration directly.
FWIW I had a similar situation last year, my FB account kept getting disabled for nonspecific rules violation. After months, it turned out to be an edge case in their billing logic.
Main takeaway: they probably aren't doing this on purpose, and would like to do a good job, but can't because they don't know how.
Useful advice I got, both from their tech support person + reddit: create a business manager acct and use it to manage your facebook account. Give access to multiple people. That way if one gets disabled you can continue your business.
Chargebacks will get you banned for life from most Meta products, potentially even affecting personal accounts FYI. Adtech vendors have blocklists for users/companies/etc that they will not do business with, and a chargeback will get your name/credit/card/etc on that list.
If you business depends on reaching people on Facebook and Instagram without having to spend hours per week on "content marketing", it could mean the death of your business.
My wife recently had a comment nuked on a six year old post asking "describe your job in an accurate but misleading way", to which she responded "I shoot babies" (she does some photography).
It's remarkably twitchy in some ways, and remarkably blind in others.
Honestly, I’m more of the opinion that they’re just cheaping out on moderation. You can’t appeal most violations now “due to COVID”, which has been a bullshit excuse for understaffing for years now.
Appealing an unjust activity from them got me in even more trouble. They had put me in 24 hours FB jail for 'indecent' content against community standards for posting a picture of my son in his bathing suit at the beach -- which their algorithm had somehow misidentified as nudity. I appealed, was denied, and as a result of appealing, spent almost a month with my posts downranked etc.
One method I've known to work for people is to buy an Oculus. You need a Facebook account for it and Oculus tech support can reactivate your Facebook account. After that return the Oculus. This is the post where I first heard of this [1] and it worked for my brother-in-law. YMMV.
This may no longer be true. I recall a story last year where you no longer require a FB account to access Oculus as they de-coupled them now. I have the original Quest but have not logged in a long while so can’t confirm if that’s the case.
Fax or mail (certified with return receipt) Facebook a letter and state that you revoke their authorization to post electronic funds transfers to your account. Staple the certified receipt or fax confirmation to a copy of the letter. That's all your bank needs (double check me here) to reverse any transactions thereafter and assess a fine to Facebook, which will likely face a fine from it's bank as well.
The matter will be resolved by next morning.
When return receipt arrives, staple that to the copy as well should the matter escalate further.
There is an asymmetry in access to the law. If you can afford a lawyer (like FarceBook) then you can do pretty much whatever you want, knowing that most people do not have the resources or will to do anything about it. So FarceBook can suspend your account and really not care. Verizon can change your plan then tell you it is policy not to let you change back. Paypal freezes your account. On and on.
Step 1 is to find out the laws in your state about small claims. Some states are small claims friendly, some not so much.
Just google "your-state small claims".
Step 2 is to document everything. keep all email. Send documents US mail with a receipt required so you can prove everything. Think of it this way - you are going to present this to the judge. If you say "I sent them a letter", the lawyer can (and often will) say "we have no record of the letter". Hauling out your receipt and saying "it was delivered to xx office on May1 at 10AM according to this receipt".So
Step 3. Understand the law. This is hard. But the law determines the outcome. Some cases may be so egregious that you don't really need to be specific, but if you can be specific it helps. You can try to find out about consumer law in your state by google. For example here is a Maine website about consumer rights: https://www.maine.gov/ag/consumer/consumer_law_guide.shtml
Step 4. Think like a judge. If you gave the other side a chance to respond (a demand letter) that is a plus. If there is no sign you attempted a reasonable resolution that is not as good.
Step 5. Win.
Doing this is hard, but in my book every small claims or pro se representation in court is a pro democracy action.
I'm interested in setting up a site to help people do small claims and appear pro se. I represented myself in a post divorce court case, lost, filed an appeal and lost the appeal. I set up a 2 second website https://usingthecourts.com. Visit and send an email if interested. Free and no tracking. (edit to remove fragment)
If you're in the US, contact your state attorney general. This is a widespread, known issue that a few are building cases about. They have back channels to facilitate getting the account back.
$300? De-minimis. The costs of you taking any legal action far outweigh the benefits. The best course of action is to cancel your card and check with your company that this blocks all recurring payments. It'll be a pain to reinstate legitimate recurring payments you may have on the card - but the flipside is you'll get a chance to review all the recurring stuff that you subscribe to!
It sounds like Facebook is going to keep billing them, so it's $300 plus whatever they get billed until the credit card expires. I presume it'll be several thousand dollars.
Definitely do chargebacks on the card. And don't mess with lawyers. Anyone telling you to contact one has never contacted one. Why would anyone spend $800 to get $300 back? Small claims is definitely a legit way to go if you cannot recover the funds. Facebook likely won't even send a representative and you'll win by default. Collecting from them is another issue in itself, but you'll at least have a judgement against them. I have taken people to small claims and it's fairly simple.
He has a small business, he should have a lawyer on retainer anyway. As such there may be no cost for a conversation (of course check with the contract - generally there is a cost). Even if there is a cost, one conversation with a lawyer is not $800. The costs add up quick if he goes to court, but odds are good he only needs one conversation and so the costs are minimal. A bit of legal advice can go a long way.
If he does go to court with a lawyer the costs will be a lot more than $800, but he can sue for legal fees as well as the loss. If Meta is being unreasonable enough that it has to go to court he will get those fees. A judge will not like seeing this trivial cost go to trail, if it gets that far the judge will be looking to see who is not reasonable and slapping them with as many fees and costs as he can.
For a lot of small-claims style things, lawyers will give you 15-30 minute consultations for free (YMMV on how useful these are, by nature its often the lawyer giving you a bunch of information you may already have, will only a couple of minutes for actual questions that they may not be ready to answer), even if you don't have a preexisting relationship.
I've seen this a lot in tenancy cases, where basically they filter out "bad landlord withholding rent" small claims style cases from "bad landlord doing illegal renovations or owner-move in evictions" that can be larger and more complicated, and want you to hire them for the second, but will give you some time for the first, in hopes that you remember that help when you run into the second case.
Exactly, law is very much a relationship business. 15 minutes of free time for them to hear your problem and give you a template letter (or better yet, put one on their letterhead and mail it for you) is absolutely a price they're willing to pay for you to say to your friends and family how great they were and how they fixed your problem for free. And let's not forget that some lawyers are people too - sticking it to someone who is taking advantage of others illegally is a not-often-discussed perk of the job.
"He has a small business, he should have a lawyer on retainer anyway."
Not all small businesses have lawyers. I would guess 90%+ don't need them and the other 90% cannot afford them. I've founded and operated a small business for 9 years and have only hired a lawyer 1 time for contractual negotiation. For what it's worth I am in a heavily regulated industry and I have no legal background.
Retainer doesn't mean work for free. Retainer means you give them money in advance so they can charge you for their time. Maybe some will give out freebies but generally speaking those that like to do things like eat food and live indoors will charge you for their time.
Each chargeback on a transaction costs Facebook about $20 even if the credit card dispute does not end up being resolved in your favor. I recommend doing this (in addition to getting legal advice or taking legal action) if you want to penalize Facebook as much as possible for the inconvenience they caused you.
It'll penalize OP way, way, way more and cause them way more inconvenience. Cost of getting a lawyer, ending up on potentially shared blacklists for chargebacks, wasted time, etc.
I feel for the OP, but this won't stick to the man. It'll stick to the op.
I think the fear of a "chargeback blacklist" is overstated here. Anyone can easily apply for another credit card, add an authorized user to their existing card, or use any card masking service to change their payment information. Chargebacks exist exactly for situations like this. I've never had issues with any shared blacklist after filing chargebacks against shoddy businesses. You must be ready to cut off contact with the business you are filing against, in case they refuse to do business with you in the future, but that's not a problem here because it looks like Facebook has already cut the OP off.
You don't need a lawyer to go to small claims court. OP can get free legal advice through a local self-help program or an inexpensive legal consultation through a local bar association program if they want to, but paying for legal assistance is certainly not mandatory.
My guess is that the FB TOS requires arbitration for all disputes arising out of use of the FB platform, or some such broad language.
Chargebacks are one idea, but it likely won't get you all your money back. I have to imagine that FBers on HN could connect you with a lawyer there — can you leave a throwaway email account in your post so that people could reach out to you? I'm a nobody but do know a lawyer or two at FB.
I am not a lawyer, but I think Terms of Service only apply if you want to... continue receiving/using the service. So even if it the TOS does have a forced arbitration clause and OP takes FB to court instead, I believe that would just mean FB could then say "You broke the TOS so we're going to suspend your account" which they've already done and so there is no incentive for OP to abide by it unless they care/expect to be able to do further business with FB in the future.
(If someone with experience with these things can provide additional clarification or correction, I'd appreciate it!)
As a (former) lawyer, I don't think it's quite that simple. There's a good chance you'd find yourself booted out of any court once they get wind of the TOS. It doesn't matter that you don't plan to keep using their service.
Would they have to physically send someone to the small claims court? The dispute is over $300 and continued unauthorized credit card charges. The cost of sending a lawyer is already pretty punitive.
Not at all. In a typically drafted contract, the arbitration clause governs conflicts arising out the contractual relationship (in this case, use of FB), and is enforced by federal statute. The enforcement mechanism is not "arbitrate or else you can't log on anymore."
However most of these silicon valley arbitration clauses do include an exception for small claims. I haven't looked at FB's though.
Not entirely applicable in this case, but I had a similar situation with Google (they claimed I owe them money, no way to actually pay, let alone challenge it). Eventually it went to a collections agency who do have humans working for them, did reply and cancelled the 'debt' immediately when I provided evidence.
Google, Facebook, etc might not want to talk to their customers. But adjacent companies might.
Other than all the courts/suing discussion, handling undeserved charges on your bill is exactly what your credit card company is supposed to do. The whole "they use different vendors" thing should be their problem, not yours. Press them again and tell them to take care of the problem regardless of which processor (and how many) they originate from.
note: Even if the dispute is settled out of court in arbitration, I think arbitration would likely be successful based on the available info. Honestly, if you can open a dispute for arbitration that seems cheaper than going to court and it's likely to work, IMHO. Though most likely is that as soon as a human at Facebook actually groks your situation they'll refund it before going to court or arbitration.
Note that these arbitration clauses aren’t necessarily enforceable and small claims judges can and do exercise a lot of discretion in their judgements.
Even if arbitration is in play, it would cost Facebook more to hire a lawyer to go to small claims court and have it moved to arbitration than it would to just settle the $300 at stake hear.
Small Claims Court in California tends to be effective. The great thing about filing a small claims court case is that the other party has to either settle, or show up in court. They do not have the option of ignoring this. They have to send someone, or lose by default.
Most small claims courts have online instructions on how to file, and many will accept filings on line. Here's California's page: [1]
Facebook reportedly no longer requires arbitration.
Small claims is an excellent option. Or alternatively take them to arbitration if the ToS provides for it. Either way the expense to you will be minimal.
Once you realize that legal is the big tech company’s first line tech support things go considerably more smoothly.
Pro tip: get on privacy.com. Give FB (or anyone online) a temporary credit card from there, rather than your "real" one.
If you're really done using their services, you can just close the card. Once the card gets declined, they will notice, believe me.
Further tip: for most things (maybe not for FB), the name & address you give are also not checked; just the card number, expiration, security code, and zip code.
Of course, you might be giving your real address and/or phone number somewhere else on the site, if you want to get something physical shipped to you.
Be careful with this. Being unable to charge your credit card does not mean a contract between you and the business has been terminated or that your financial responsibility went away. Regardless of how difficult it is to reach them and hit the cancel button.
Nothing's ever happened to me, and I've been doing it for years. Yes, they could come after you. If you're worried about that, feel free to keep getting fleeced.
As far as I know, it cannot (legally) affect your credit if you have disputed the charges, and the debt collectors are not allowed to continue contacting you.
I tested this theory out ~20 years ago. Things may have changed since then.
At any rate, after you have called them, sent their legal dept a delivery receipt letter, issued chargebacks against multiple of their shell credit card processing accounts, and cancelled your credit card, it is going to be difficult for them to actually collect anything for the unwanted services they provided after the initial cancellation (even in arbitration).
Thank you all for the useful comments and feedback.
I noted some people asking where I am from: BC, Canada.
I am not sure how much this changes from the legal standpoint.
But I will carefully review all your feedback, and proceed carefully with different options provided.
Should I create another post about how this will get resolved, or simply reply again to this thread?
Much appreciated.
I had a similar thing happen, where an account that I use only to run ads and never post anything was flagged as a bot. I eventually got through to a person on chat who was entirely unhelpful, but in the survey after I just typed out my issue in every text box. A few days later my account was unbanned and I could log in and stop the ads. Kinda mind blowing process to be honest, probably won't be doing business with them again.
If your business is incorporated, you might not be able to take the small claims court route. You need to double-check the rules for your state; some only allow natural persons as small claims plaintiffs.
What would otherwise be a slam-dunk could end up being a waste of time if you show up and the judge decides the wrong party filed the suit (you personally vs. the business associated with the Facebook ads account).
I am in the exact same boat.. and someone hijacked the account and actually activated ad services. They have thus far been unresponsive and I really don't have it in me to rebuild 18 years of social networking. I may have to give this demand letter deal a shot.
You can ask your banks to not perform this update. I've had success with Amex and Citi. Depends a bit on whether the customer service rep knows what you're talking about, but it's very possible.
Some payment processors will update the company charging with the new card information. Getting a new card does not absolve you from the contractual obligation you agreed to in order to use the ad platform. Sad.
By the same token the contract probably also stipulated that it could be cancelled in a way that Facebook is currently blocking. I don't think any court would hold that the purchaser is now required to pay for services perpetually.
If this is true, then cancel the credit card, and get one from someone else.
Later, reapply for the one you cancelled. They’d love to have you back.
(Though, honestly, I’ve never had this problem where I say “this charge is unauthorized, please treat my number as stolen to prevent further fraud”, and then the bank says, “OK, but we have to continue to honor payments the thief set up with the old number”)
Depends on a lot of things, but getting the card reissued with a new number wouldn't.
Closing a card that was younger than your average card shouldn't.
Anyway, being willing to walk away from the credit card account is key to getting the credit card company to help you more, if they aren't helping enough. "i'd like to close my account, because you can't stop the unauthorized charges from X" is a pretty clear message.
> Depends on a lot of things, but getting the card reissued with a new number wouldn't.
Reporting it lost and getting the card reissued with a new number doesn't solve the problem anymore. Banks and card issuers are starting to share information with services that report updated card numbers to recurrent billers like the Wall Street Journal.
These started popping up around the time every business model became subscription-based. When you want to capture anything, block all the exits first.
You cannot get away from them unless you close the account.
I'd contact a few news agencies in your city, see if someone wants to pick it up as a human interest story. Maybe call up your reps in Congress, one of them might like an excuse to rail against tech companies.
Hey I built getdispute.com to do literally exactly this: sue big companies in small claims court easily.
First, I strongly recommend sending them a demand letter. You can generate one for free on getdispute.com/products/demand-letter and/or pay us a few bucks to mail it.
Second, physically mail the letter to their legal address. The mail goes to someone in legal tasked with reading the mail.
90% of our cases end here. A correctly written demand letter, sent by physical mail usually gets noticed and resolved very quickly.
If nothing happens after a few weeks (give it 3-4 wks) then you could file a case in court. This will require you to file the case, pay the filing fee, and then serve the defendant via a 3rd party process server. Could all be done in 1 day if you know what you're doing. If you serve the defendant (FB) correctly, they are now obligated to show up to court or otherwise risk a default judgement against them that cannot be reversed later.
Another 50-75% of cases end here as most defendants prefer to settle out of court.
If they don't respond, you will need to go to your court date and explain the case to the judge. Usually, without a defendant appearing, the court will grant a default judgement in your favor, assuming the judge decides they do in fact have jurisdiction. To be safe on jurisdiction, file in the county FB does business, or otherwise has a legal entity registered.
All of this said... it's probably not worth the time/money to do more than send a demand letter. It is probably worth your time to send a physical demand letter.
Good luck. 2.7m small claims court cases are filed each year in the US, approx 50% by individuals. So you're in good company.
I see that your website asks $9 + $10/month for the basics package.
I've never once had the need to write a demand letter, so if I ever need to, I'd expect to be a one time thing. I definitely won't need a monthly service.
How does that work in this case? Does it mean I'd pay $19 and then cancel the monthly service?
There is a one time option (just click the tab at top of screen that says one time).
Alternatively, you can cancel immediately if you'd like. It's standard stripe portal with 2 clicks or so. You will get a renewal reminder 7 days before it charges next month.
People who subscribe tend to find a lot of little annoyances with companies/refunds/travel stuff (airlines are a big one) that more than pays for the subscription. But feel free to use as is best for you.
You say airlines are a big part of your business model. Do you only work with US airlines or do you support letters for EU261 rules as well? I'm a very frequent flyer and never had many issues with getting compensation from domestic airlines but European airlines are an entirely different story. I've found the best experience has been paid services that take a huge cut like Airhelp, so it would be nice to not pay 35% every time I have an issue.
I'd consider filing something against Frontier for a gate employe giving me wrong information (I have it documented) resulting monetary loss. But then I was afraid they'd blacklist me from flying. As much as I don't want to fly them, they have a lot of flights out of my city.
Have you heard of airlines doing that?
FWIW I did contact their CS & social media and basically got told "too bad you got some wrong info..."
Agreed with this. IMO, it should charge a one time fee to handle it all, and probably more than $19. I can't see many people suing folks monthly. Charge me $40 or $50 and take care of everything for me!
They rely on you forgetting to cancel. Then when you notice a few months later, you demand a refund. They won’t give it to you, necessitating that you resubscribe in order to send them a demand letter. #growthhacking
Not really. We have Stripe send a recharge reminder 7 days before it happens next month with an option to unsubscribe through Stripe subscription portal in 2ish clicks. No cancellation reason asked.
I've done plenty of growth hacking before, and our subscription flow is not trying to do that.
First: customers looking for their service are likely to be noisy and costly if the business screws them. The business is selecting for fractious customers so the business needs to be careful.
Secondly: the business is a specialist in the art of dealing with small claims. If a customer needs to make a small claim against the business, the business understands the system in depth, and can defend itself better than most. Although I would also expect the business understands the financial costs better, and perhaps are more refund friendly than other businesses might be.
My company got a default judgement in small claims court ($3k) that I only learned about months after it happened because the state of California had a totally wrong address (mixed up with some other company) in their database. So I was served at some random address that was fortunately only 50 miles from me; “fortunate” because I still had to appear at that county’s courthouse to make any appeal.
The fact that The California State Corporations Board had the wrong address had no bearing on my appeal - that was “my fault” for not monitoring it and having it corrected.
So I filed for an actual appeal, appeared before the judge with the plaintiff (and a lawyer on my side that cost $2500), and won the appeal on the merits of the case. Had I not won, the state would have issued a bill and denied the business renewal unless paid.
It was an utterly bogus claim by a plaintiff that admitted he made a hobby of small claims court. Most of his cases he won because he defendants never showed up; as I didn’t originally because of the wrong service address.
Two lessons: check the state records for your business religiously (because it’s your fault if they get it wrong, no matter what), and fight the claim no matter what or you’ll become a target for future small-claims rewards because the judgements are public information.
OP explicitly said in their post that they've already sent a physical demand letter:
> I wrote a letter twice, and sent in the mail via postage, with tracking, which was delivered, to cancel my Ad services and provide a refund. No response however.
I achieved my quickest, simplest, most pleasant customer service interaction yet with an airline by writing a letter explaining what they did (with transaction IDs, confirmation numbers, etc), and what they should have done. The situation was not entirely simple, and I was not looking forward to explaining it verbally to a rep.
They sent me back a simple letter a couple weeks later saying they'd resolved the issue the way I requested and provided me the updated documentation.
I'll definitely consider this approach next time something like this happens.
I keep this article in my bookmarks re: how to write a proper complaint letter. It talks specifically about credit reporting agencies, but a lot of what he says can be applied anywhere else: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2017/09/09/identity-theft-credit-r...
I have $4000+ in collections because insurance didn't pay for what they were supposed to, and the hospital decided to send it to collections. Should I send the demand letter to the collector, hospital, or insurance?
There is a book I recently purchased called "Never Pay The First Bill". It covers this exact kind of scenario and tells you what to do step by step, all the way up to small claims court, though you usually don't need to go that far. Highly recommended.
More than likely you're going to need to get an itemized bill from the hospital listing the actual icd-10 charge codes and amounts for each service. Then you will need to cross reference this with your insurance's Explanation of Benefits document, which shows what the insurer paid for each code and the remaining that you owe. If there are any codes missing, there has been a miscommunication between the hospital and insurance, and the insurance was not billed for something. It is also possible there will be errors in the codes themselves, charging you for things you did not receive or received less than they said (charge code for 1 hr complex appointment when your appointment was 10 minutes). In this case, you will need to request your medical records, and cross reference them with the charge codes to dispute the wrong codes.
It also tells you how to deal with collection agencies.
I have not run into the problem of insurance denying charges for things they are supposed to cover, but I have tried (years ago) to cross-reference my medical bills with my EoBs and gave up as nothing ever really matched up.
You need to request the HCFA (maybe this has finally gone away after ~10 years) or CMS-1500 claim form for outpatient (like a clinic or same-day surgery or medical imaging) or UB-04 claim form for inpatient (hospital/skilled nursing stay) service.
The actual claims are generated and sent electronically as 837 or 837P formatted garbage (just look up the standard) by all but the tiniest providers but virtually any billing software can generate the equivalent "paper" form.
EoB quality depends on your insurance carrier; if they don't provide a breakdown with the original charge codes and diagnosis codes and a coverage decision then complain and request a more detailed explanation.
The most confusing part is the adjustments; every year the insurance companies and service providers in the U.S. waste a horrific amount of time and effort negotiating adjustment (discount) rates per insurance carrier (insurance always pays less than face value) and charge code. The provider picks prices that give them an overall net positive revenue given the set of adjustments from their (predicted) patient population and corresponding insurance carrier spread, so none of the prices or adjustments actually make any marketplace sense.
If you end up having to fully pay a bill that insurance won't cover, try to offer the provider ~50% and they'll be pretty happy to write off the difference since they wouldn't get much more from insurance. There are also often payment plans and other assistance available if you ask the billers.
I mean, I'll get a bill from my doctor (actually his group practice or whatever) it will list services that I recognize, show what the insurance paid, and what I owe (if anything). It usually looks about right and I have just not ever found that the time needed to audit that against the EoB statements has ever been worth it. The times I tried I got a headache and gave up but like I said it was years ago, well before ACA or any possible reforms that might have been made in the area of transparency in health care/insurance billing reports.
It is supposed to. It is supposed to be the exact same codes. If that is not the case then you were mis-billed, which according to that book is a common occurance.
20+ years ago, I was in a situation that, at this high level anyway, was similar to what you're describing. The collections agency had also put a black mark on my credit history. I don't recall the details, but to whatever extent I did contact the medical provider or the insurance company, they claimed to be unable to help me. (I no longer owed them money, afterall.) The amount I supposedly owed was some hundreds of dollars, not thousands.
After repeatedly failing to have any success communicating with the collections agency, I sent a letter to the Better Business Bureau about the situation. The collector stopped contacting me and my credit history was restored. I never spoke with a lawyer about it and don't know if my approach to addressing the problem was typical.
From my experience, I would suggest that you take the fight to the collector. They are the ones to whom you currently supposedly owe money. (I did not attempt to sue anyone, though, and maybe that detail, or others, would change the answer for your specific situation.)
> The collections agency had also put a black mark on my credit history.
This doesn't seem to be true. According to Experian, the original _creditor_ is the one that puts the black mark on your credit history when they sell your debt to a collections agency. (Typically for pennies on the dollar.)
> After repeatedly failing to have any success communicating with the collections agency, I sent a letter to the Better Business Bureau about the situation. The collector stopped contacting me and my credit history was restored. I never spoke with a lawyer about it and don't know if my approach to addressing the problem was typical.
At a guess, the collections agency might have decided it wasn't worth fighting you over it for a few hundred dollars and dropped your case to spend more time on larger targets. But I don't see how they (or the BBB) could have fixed your credit report, they don't have the power to do that.
> I would suggest that you take the fight to the collector.
I mean, you can try but you are unlikely to succeed. These people are (usually) skilled negotiators, they can't easily be outfoxed or convinced to be on your side. Their only goal is to get money from you. The dirty secret that the collections agencies don't want people to know is that nobody has any actual obligation to pay them. They buy bad debt and hope they can convince you to pay them. The ONLY leverage they have is the ability to guilt and intimidate. Some agencies engage in shady behavior (calling friends and neighbors, making threats). These behaviors are generally illegal, but the kind of people who fall that far into debt are generally not the kind of people who can afford to take legal action against a lawyered-up agency.
You never HAVE to pay a collections agency, and even if you do, the debt NEVER gets paid back to the original creditor, just the agency collecting it. Neither will paying them fix your credit report in any way.
If you have debt that was legitimately defaulted on and made its way all the way to a collections agency, the very best thing to do is not engage them. They will give up eventually. They _might_ try to help if the debt wound up in collections due to a creditor's mistake, but I wouldn't bet too much on it.
> > The collections agency had also put a black mark on my credit history.
> This doesn't seem to be true.
Maybe the situation has changed over the past couple decades. (I don't recall which of the three credit reporting agencies this was with.) It was true for me back then. :)
In my case, the collector didn't initiate contact. I learned of the situation because I checked my credit report and then it was I who contacted them. I didn't know who they were or why they thought I owed them money. They tried to convince me to pay them, saying they'd remove the mark from my credit report after I did so.
I had believed the medical service (a couple years in the past at that time) had been completely covered by insurance and didn't know that anyone thought money was owed. I don't know where the original miscommunication/mistake had occurred. I only know that the collector dinged my credit report and that I had documentation showing that my insurance had addressed the original claim (paying the medical provider), which enabled me to challenge the collection agency's assertion.
(Thank you for the additional information and context you've added about collection agencies. I knew little about them outside of my direct experience with this one.)
Healthcare is more complicated and it might be worth talking to an attorney (pay for an hour of time) to get advice on which party to pursue and how. This is unfortunately the biggest challenge with our service... how can we help people when it gets more complex.
You honestly don't need one in the UK, filing small claims via the governments site is very easy. They'll auto send a demand letter for you etc. https://www.gov.uk/make-court-claim-for-money
>Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
I'd love to crack down hard on unscrupulous behavior in tech companies. But the kind of penalties I have in mind demands due process and default presumption of innocence. Which means not making accusations based on only a hunch.
In this example, how can the question be investigated quietly?
I may be in the minority here, but while I empathize with you over the indignity of it I don't think this would be a slam-dunk case for you unless their agent just doesn't bother to show.
You paid them to serve ads. They presumably served the ads as promised, and your store is currently benefiting from the ads. "But I didn't want them" doesn't get you far when you previously signed a recurrent-billing contract.
If this gets all the way to a judge, on paper, it'll look like you just failed to stop service. You'll argue it was impossible. They'll reply with "you could have gone to [some form on some obscure page]" to cancel. The icing on the cake will be "you would have known if you read the terms and conditions you signed."
Skip that humiliation and re-read the terms and conditions to see if there's some specific rain dance you have to do to end the contract.
If nobody here can work some magic on your behalf, I would suggest you cancel your credit card and cut your losses ($300 is less than a speeding ticket or runaway AWS bill). The time involved in filing and the mere cost of parking at the courthouse once or twice is going to claim a chunk of that anyway, if you win.
If you're really bitter, file chargebacks. You can always bypass blacklists by playing at synthetic identity fraud (start using androgynous nicknames for yourself, typoed versions of your last name and addresses of friends/family on all future applications for anything to fuzz the credit bureaus).
There's a reason everything is now subscription-based with an obfuscated cancellation process-- we've found a way to institutionalize negative option billing. Welcome to America.
ed: I started poking around at it for you just for fun. I lost faith in the legal system so long ago that I forgot all about the joys of arbitration! You definitely wouldn't win at kangaroo court.
> You agree to arbitrate Commercial Claims between you and Meta Platforms, Inc. This provision does not cover any commercial claims relating to violations of your or our intellectual property rights, including, but not limited to, copyright infringement, patent infringement, trademark infringement, violations of the Brand Usage Guidelines, violations of your or our confidential information or trade secrets, or efforts to interfere with our Products or engage with our Products in unauthorized ways (for example, automated ways). If a Commercial Claim between you and Meta Platforms, Inc. is not subject to arbitration, you agree that the claim must be resolved exclusively in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California or a state court located in San Mateo County, and that you submit to the personal jurisdiction of either of these courts for the purpose of litigating any such claim.
This is extremely poor advice. Demand letter + small claims court is definitely the way to go. Contact the bar association in your county or state, they may be able to direct you to low cost legal help (a litigation clinic at a law school? Who knows) or a lawyer.
If you're European, frame it as a GDPR issue. You have the legal right to correct your information.
Mail dpo@facebook.com, asking them to correct this, explaining them you have tried normal channels, and reminding them they have one month to reply. Failure to do so means you can lodge a complaint with your local data protection instance.
Well, Facebook (and most other websites) is a private corporate premises, they can certainly stop doing business with anyone for any legal reason (e.g. they just don't like you).
Taking money from you is a different matter, of course. But they don't have any obligations to provide you their services.
I ended up in the same situation with my restaurant business. Personal Facebook account was suspended (which hadn't been used for anything except buying ads for mentioned business for something like ~4 years), and I guess because of that, the professional Instagram account linked with the personal Facebook was also suspended.
I had ads running and tried for ~2 weeks to do anything about it, but Facebook kept charging me and I kept being unable to resolve it by any manner at all. Eventually reached a real human via Facebook support somehow, and they said there was nothing they could do.
Had to lock and block my card for the charges to stop. Wrote to my bank about them charging me even though I was suspended, I got all the money back from the day the suspension started (took screenshots from day one it happened) and I'll never use anything related to Facebook again.
So I guess my advise is to lock the card, ask your bank nicely and if the bank won't help you, take it to court. Not sure what country you are in, but usually there are organizations that help you pro-bono for easy cases like this when huge companies try to take advantage of the small person, often leading to something called "small claims court".
Sounds like class action lawsuit material. Even if they have an arbitration clause, the contract likely ended when the account was suspended. Continuing to charge the card after the fact thus would NOT be covered by arbitration unless the contract explicitly covers this (unlikely). This is assuming you sue over the fraudulent charges and not to restore the account. The second you try to restore the account the original contract would be valid.
Just my educated guess at least. IANAL, but I've participated in lawsuits and I have studied law and read tons of case law (had my development career not taken off I would have absolutely become a lawyer...and I still might). I would welcome for an actual lawyer to pitch in, however.
Also sounds like it would be appropriate to write to your state's Attorney General, maybe of several states. This is exactly the kind of widespread low-grade fraud that is suitable for them to pursue (much more legal overhead than worth it to each victim, but creating large damages in aggregate).
Why class action this and not small claims? Does the OP have a burning need to wait four years and watch a lawyer take 90% of the bounty?
Hell, even arbitration sounds quite likely to resolve the issue to his satisfaction. Am I missing something?
All class action lawsuits have a named plaintiff that represents the class, and gets more of the settlement than the rest (how much is totally up to the agreement with the law firm).
But in this particular case, a letter from a lawyer outlining some specific laws/contracts that FB is violating will get them to stop immediately.
Keep in mind getting more of the settlement might still not mean much. I was the class representative for a class action against Sharp and I got…$1,000.
Woo. The process was interesting, so there’s that. It does also take up quite a bit of time. I definitely got less than minimum wage.
> Why class action this and not small claims?
Not OP but I’d think to hold FB accountable and stop this behavior.
Sounds like something someone could do, yeah. But luckily the bank was understanding and gave me my money back, and I can't justify spending the time on trying to make things right with a party (Facebook) that has absolutely no will do make things right.
It's someone else's battle to fight.
It will absolutely get their attention and get your issue in front of a real person who will have the organizational power to fix it.
A cheaper way to do the same thing is to fedex a business letter written in formal english, citing dates and times you tried to resolve the situation and that your next step is to file a legal complaint.
It should be just as effective but it will save you the small claims filing fees.
I’ve actually had very good luck with filling out the small claims court document as if I’m suing the person and then mailing a copy of the document to them with a note that says, “Filing this on Monday unless I hear from you by xxx”.
I like this approach - will definitely try this (with FedEx signature delivery) in future!
Google "demand letter template" so the letter has the look/feel/keywords that get it routed to the right people.
Form letters happen to be one of ChatGPT's more-underrated areas of utility.
"Write a legal demand letter to Facebook about..."
Verify any addresses and don't let it cite law, but sometimes it can help articulate what your grievance even is better than you can (by putting a name to it in some cases). Aggrieved parties are seldom as coherent as they could be.
This definitely works (I just cut&pasted this post into 3.5 and it did a decent job)
This is also a nice time to have a lawyer friend and ask if they can print it on their firm’s stationary.
Looks like they already did this, more or less.
>I wrote a letter twice, and sent in the mail via postage, with tracking, which was delivered, to cancel my Ad services and provide a refund. No response however.
You don’t specify where you are but if you’re in the UK, use the free small claims process [1]. No lawyers, no expenses, pre-trail hearing with a judge (over the phone), and then a trial if the judge decides it has legal legs.
I’ve used it before and it’s very effective. They will send a letter to Facebook on your behalf (with all the court’s crown logos on the letterhead, etc), they must respond or end up in court.
[1] https://www.moneyclaim.gov.uk/web/mcol/welcome
Small Claims is effective, but if you win - and you probably will - there's no guarantee that a company the size of Facebook will care. This has been a common problem for people suing airlines which ignore legal obligations to pay out under compensation law.
So you'll have to go to court again for an enforcement order.
If you get one of those you can send bailiffs in to take stuff and sell it on your behalf. But it's starting to get expensive at this point.
Although it will probably get FB's attention, especially if someone from the press just happens to be there to take photos when the bailiffs go in.
> But it's starting to get expensive at this point
I don't believe this is the case in the UK. By this point the costs are being run up against the defendant and they have to pay the bailiff fees:
https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/debt-and-money/action-your...
Correct - if you're enforcing a judgment in the UK, the cost of doing so gets paid by the defendant. The bailiffs will handle this themselves by seizing enough to cover the judgment amounts and their own costs.
Once you have an order to enforce the judgement your bailiffs can walk into the Facebook's London office and start removing property and nobody will be able to stop them.
I thought this was the case. An unhappy customer of Wizz Air did this recently which is why this was in the back of my mind:
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/uk-news/dad-gets-4500-wiz...
My favourite part of this article:
"He then applied for bailiffs who attended the Wizz Air desk at Luton Airport - saying they could take goods including chairs, tables, computers or an even aircraft."
> even aircraft
Brilliant, I'd love to see that enacted!
It's worth going in, if you're going in out of spite:
> On June 3, Nyerges, two sheriff's deputies and a moving truck showed up at the local BofA branch. The deputies informed the manager that he could either pay the Nyerges' legal fees— $2,500—or the movers would start taking away the bank's furniture and cash. The manager, after conferring with his superiors, gave the deputies a check.
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/bank-america-florida-foreclo...
> The following browsers have been confirmed as being fully compatible with MCOL; • Internet Explorer version 6, 7 8 and 9 • Firefox version 3 • Opera version 9 • Safari version 5 • Chrome version 9
wow, www.moneyclaim.gov.uk looks very useful
do you have any idea if you need to be (even for an hour) physically there? that would change a lot in terms of traveling costs
I didn't get to the trial stage the two times I've used it, so I am not sure, but I would assume so. The first time the letter from HM Courts was enough to put the shits up the defendant (which is I think the biggest value of this for small claims against 'small' parties); the second time I got to the pre-trial phone-call with the judge, he said "Yep, there's enough here to go to trial", and then the defendant backed down.
I'd be very surprised if many of these go to the final trial phase. It's nearly never worth the effort of doing so for the defendant, just pay up and not risk having a county court judgement around your neck.
You should exhaust your administrative remedies first. Go through your bank and through facebook. For your bank a chargeback, read the specific terms, it sounds like services not received would apply if you are unable to access the services. Presumably facebook is not continuing to run the ads if the account was banned. Eliott has some good contact info for executive customer service as you have already contacted them the normal way.
Failing that it costs around $100 to file in small claims and serve the defendant, if you lose you are out that money, plus the time. If you win the fee is included in the judgement is almost every state. The process is to find the registered agent to name in the lawsuit, file the case with the clerk where the defendant is located and pay the fees, serve the defendant and have proof of service. Most likely they will negotiate a settlement and it would end there, before going to court. If you can't agree you go to small claims and either travel in person or appear by teleconference. Make your case with the judge and prove all the elements required for your type of case, it isn't super formal though. If you win and get a judgement and either they pay or you go to the sheriffs to collect.
In the county I live in I think the court fees are $250, plus service (Sheriff charges another $250 if you use them).
Most judges will look at you crazy if your suit is for the same as the filing fees. I've been told I can't file a suit for less than the fees, but my fees are always zero as our county courts don't charge indigents. I often file suits just to vindicate my rights. I once won a case I filed for $1.81.
Interesting. I have contemplated spending more on court fees than what would be my potential remedy, just for principle alone. I think that justice itself has value.
IF you have the money, it's worth talking to a lawyer; because if you do things right you can often get "legal fees" awarded as part of "company is big dumb and pisses off the judge". But you have to do it right to get those.
> I tried contacting my credit card company, but FB uses a different vendor account for each bill posted, making it difficult for the credit card company to stop these transactions.
Another option might be to have the credit card company handle thing as if you had fraud on the card. Cancel the card, issue you an new number, and -- critically, you will have to specifically ask them to do this -- do not automatically update billers with an existing relationship with the new number/authorization for you.
Assuming this works correctly (it may not), FB will be unable to bill you for the ad spend. The downside of this is that they may send these debts to collections at some point, which could hurt your credit rating and be a problem for other reasons.
So this might be more of a last resort.
Somewhat related - my wife and I own a small business and Yelp basically forced us into a $150 a month advertising package by deleting all out positive reviews and posting bogus negative reviews (they were by people not even locate in our state). At the time we were new so this was a big deal.
We went along with it but at some point our card expired and I never updated my account with them. I tracked it for a few months to ensure they weren’t accumulating, once that proved true I never thought about them again and mark their invoices as spam. Going on a year plus and it’s continued to work; we don’t pay them a dime, our few positive reviews we get at yelp remain online and we encourage our customers to avoid them and post everywhere else.
Have you confirmed that their charges aren't still showing up on your credit card statement? Merchants collecting recurring payments use updater services to update expiration dates automatically.
Yup, they are not.
FYI small claims courts are limited -- in NY, for example, I'm fairly sure small claims can provide equitable relief but not punitive or injunctive (pay back money, but can't give you a penalty or force FB to do something).
In practice it doesn't matter (you just need to get their attention + they will fix). Depending on FB's TOS, they may try to move you to arbitration, though once again, you don't care, you just want to get expert attention.
Maybe read the TOS before filing -- you might be able to trigger arbitration directly.
FWIW I had a similar situation last year, my FB account kept getting disabled for nonspecific rules violation. After months, it turned out to be an edge case in their billing logic.
Main takeaway: they probably aren't doing this on purpose, and would like to do a good job, but can't because they don't know how.
Useful advice I got, both from their tech support person + reddit: create a business manager acct and use it to manage your facebook account. Give access to multiple people. That way if one gets disabled you can continue your business.
> you might be able to trigger arbitration directly
After sending a demand letter, this is the best advice in this thread.
Chargebacks will get you banned for life from most Meta products, potentially even affecting personal accounts FYI. Adtech vendors have blocklists for users/companies/etc that they will not do business with, and a chargeback will get your name/credit/card/etc on that list.
is that a bad thing?
If you business depends on reaching people on Facebook and Instagram without having to spend hours per week on "content marketing", it could mean the death of your business.
Just spend the money on TikTok. You'll get more bang for buck.
Unfortunately it doesn't have the same reach everywhere. Barely used in the country where I had my business, compared to Facebook/Instagram.
And that's good
Few weeks back I posted a comment on Instagram. A warning popped up that it wasn't as per community standards.
I understood that it was wrongthink, so I immediately deleted my comment.
The warning system on Instagram comments is good for protecting you from committing Thoughtcrime.
My wife recently had a comment nuked on a six year old post asking "describe your job in an accurate but misleading way", to which she responded "I shoot babies" (she does some photography).
It's remarkably twitchy in some ways, and remarkably blind in others.
Almost like the enforcement is highly selective and rife with abuse worse than the comments themselves. Huh, weird.
Honestly, I’m more of the opinion that they’re just cheaping out on moderation. You can’t appeal most violations now “due to COVID”, which has been a bullshit excuse for understaffing for years now.
Appealing an unjust activity from them got me in even more trouble. They had put me in 24 hours FB jail for 'indecent' content against community standards for posting a picture of my son in his bathing suit at the beach -- which their algorithm had somehow misidentified as nudity. I appealed, was denied, and as a result of appealing, spent almost a month with my posts downranked etc.
They are vile.
[dead]
One method I've known to work for people is to buy an Oculus. You need a Facebook account for it and Oculus tech support can reactivate your Facebook account. After that return the Oculus. This is the post where I first heard of this [1] and it worked for my brother-in-law. YMMV.
--
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29624826
This is dystopia
This may no longer be true. I recall a story last year where you no longer require a FB account to access Oculus as they de-coupled them now. I have the original Quest but have not logged in a long while so can’t confirm if that’s the case.
File a chargeback. They will instantly cancel your account.
Fax or mail (certified with return receipt) Facebook a letter and state that you revoke their authorization to post electronic funds transfers to your account. Staple the certified receipt or fax confirmation to a copy of the letter. That's all your bank needs (double check me here) to reverse any transactions thereafter and assess a fine to Facebook, which will likely face a fine from it's bank as well.
The matter will be resolved by next morning.
When return receipt arrives, staple that to the copy as well should the matter escalate further.
Have a lawyer write a letter to their lawyers. Their lawyers will have incentives aligned to what you want better than the rest of the company.
Absolutely.
There is an asymmetry in access to the law. If you can afford a lawyer (like FarceBook) then you can do pretty much whatever you want, knowing that most people do not have the resources or will to do anything about it. So FarceBook can suspend your account and really not care. Verizon can change your plan then tell you it is policy not to let you change back. Paypal freezes your account. On and on.
But you have the right to take people to court. This guy took Instagram to court, then to the Supreme Court of New Hampshire. He won his appeal to the NHSC. https://www.nhpr.org/post/teatotaller-caf-owner-takes-facebo...
Step 1 is to find out the laws in your state about small claims. Some states are small claims friendly, some not so much. Just google "your-state small claims".
Step 2 is to document everything. keep all email. Send documents US mail with a receipt required so you can prove everything. Think of it this way - you are going to present this to the judge. If you say "I sent them a letter", the lawyer can (and often will) say "we have no record of the letter". Hauling out your receipt and saying "it was delivered to xx office on May1 at 10AM according to this receipt".So
Step 3. Understand the law. This is hard. But the law determines the outcome. Some cases may be so egregious that you don't really need to be specific, but if you can be specific it helps. You can try to find out about consumer law in your state by google. For example here is a Maine website about consumer rights: https://www.maine.gov/ag/consumer/consumer_law_guide.shtml
Step 4. Think like a judge. If you gave the other side a chance to respond (a demand letter) that is a plus. If there is no sign you attempted a reasonable resolution that is not as good.
Step 5. Win.
Doing this is hard, but in my book every small claims or pro se representation in court is a pro democracy action.
I'm interested in setting up a site to help people do small claims and appear pro se. I represented myself in a post divorce court case, lost, filed an appeal and lost the appeal. I set up a 2 second website https://usingthecourts.com. Visit and send an email if interested. Free and no tracking. (edit to remove fragment)
Step 6. Collect. Winning isn’t enough; you also have to get the money.
That’ll be the real trick in this case, since it’s not as though one could just send the local sheriff in to do a till tap.
If you're in the US, contact your state attorney general. This is a widespread, known issue that a few are building cases about. They have back channels to facilitate getting the account back.
$300? De-minimis. The costs of you taking any legal action far outweigh the benefits. The best course of action is to cancel your card and check with your company that this blocks all recurring payments. It'll be a pain to reinstate legitimate recurring payments you may have on the card - but the flipside is you'll get a chance to review all the recurring stuff that you subscribe to!
Sometimes it's about the principle.
It sounds like Facebook is going to keep billing them, so it's $300 plus whatever they get billed until the credit card expires. I presume it'll be several thousand dollars.
Definitely do chargebacks on the card. And don't mess with lawyers. Anyone telling you to contact one has never contacted one. Why would anyone spend $800 to get $300 back? Small claims is definitely a legit way to go if you cannot recover the funds. Facebook likely won't even send a representative and you'll win by default. Collecting from them is another issue in itself, but you'll at least have a judgement against them. I have taken people to small claims and it's fairly simple.
He has a small business, he should have a lawyer on retainer anyway. As such there may be no cost for a conversation (of course check with the contract - generally there is a cost). Even if there is a cost, one conversation with a lawyer is not $800. The costs add up quick if he goes to court, but odds are good he only needs one conversation and so the costs are minimal. A bit of legal advice can go a long way.
If he does go to court with a lawyer the costs will be a lot more than $800, but he can sue for legal fees as well as the loss. If Meta is being unreasonable enough that it has to go to court he will get those fees. A judge will not like seeing this trivial cost go to trail, if it gets that far the judge will be looking to see who is not reasonable and slapping them with as many fees and costs as he can.
> generally there is a cost
For a lot of small-claims style things, lawyers will give you 15-30 minute consultations for free (YMMV on how useful these are, by nature its often the lawyer giving you a bunch of information you may already have, will only a couple of minutes for actual questions that they may not be ready to answer), even if you don't have a preexisting relationship.
I've seen this a lot in tenancy cases, where basically they filter out "bad landlord withholding rent" small claims style cases from "bad landlord doing illegal renovations or owner-move in evictions" that can be larger and more complicated, and want you to hire them for the second, but will give you some time for the first, in hopes that you remember that help when you run into the second case.
Exactly, law is very much a relationship business. 15 minutes of free time for them to hear your problem and give you a template letter (or better yet, put one on their letterhead and mail it for you) is absolutely a price they're willing to pay for you to say to your friends and family how great they were and how they fixed your problem for free. And let's not forget that some lawyers are people too - sticking it to someone who is taking advantage of others illegally is a not-often-discussed perk of the job.
"He has a small business, he should have a lawyer on retainer anyway."
Not all small businesses have lawyers. I would guess 90%+ don't need them and the other 90% cannot afford them. I've founded and operated a small business for 9 years and have only hired a lawyer 1 time for contractual negotiation. For what it's worth I am in a heavily regulated industry and I have no legal background.
180%? Nice.
Retainer doesn't mean work for free. Retainer means you give them money in advance so they can charge you for their time. Maybe some will give out freebies but generally speaking those that like to do things like eat food and live indoors will charge you for their time.
Was your email to legal@ a demand letter? I’ve sent demand letters to that email previously and had my issues, both times, sorted within 48 hours.
File a chargeback on the credit cards
Each chargeback on a transaction costs Facebook about $20 even if the credit card dispute does not end up being resolved in your favor. I recommend doing this (in addition to getting legal advice or taking legal action) if you want to penalize Facebook as much as possible for the inconvenience they caused you.
It'll penalize OP way, way, way more and cause them way more inconvenience. Cost of getting a lawyer, ending up on potentially shared blacklists for chargebacks, wasted time, etc.
I feel for the OP, but this won't stick to the man. It'll stick to the op.
I think the fear of a "chargeback blacklist" is overstated here. Anyone can easily apply for another credit card, add an authorized user to their existing card, or use any card masking service to change their payment information. Chargebacks exist exactly for situations like this. I've never had issues with any shared blacklist after filing chargebacks against shoddy businesses. You must be ready to cut off contact with the business you are filing against, in case they refuse to do business with you in the future, but that's not a problem here because it looks like Facebook has already cut the OP off.
You don't need a lawyer to go to small claims court. OP can get free legal advice through a local self-help program or an inexpensive legal consultation through a local bar association program if they want to, but paying for legal assistance is certainly not mandatory.
You don’t need a lawyer to issue a chargeback.
Agreed about the FB blacklist though. Sometimes I think I should set up a bunch of shell LLCs for my consumer accounts.
My guess is that the FB TOS requires arbitration for all disputes arising out of use of the FB platform, or some such broad language.
Chargebacks are one idea, but it likely won't get you all your money back. I have to imagine that FBers on HN could connect you with a lawyer there — can you leave a throwaway email account in your post so that people could reach out to you? I'm a nobody but do know a lawyer or two at FB.
I am not a lawyer, but I think Terms of Service only apply if you want to... continue receiving/using the service. So even if it the TOS does have a forced arbitration clause and OP takes FB to court instead, I believe that would just mean FB could then say "You broke the TOS so we're going to suspend your account" which they've already done and so there is no incentive for OP to abide by it unless they care/expect to be able to do further business with FB in the future.
(If someone with experience with these things can provide additional clarification or correction, I'd appreciate it!)
As a (former) lawyer, I don't think it's quite that simple. There's a good chance you'd find yourself booted out of any court once they get wind of the TOS. It doesn't matter that you don't plan to keep using their service.
Would they have to physically send someone to the small claims court? The dispute is over $300 and continued unauthorized credit card charges. The cost of sending a lawyer is already pretty punitive.
Got it, thanks for the correction!
Not at all. In a typically drafted contract, the arbitration clause governs conflicts arising out the contractual relationship (in this case, use of FB), and is enforced by federal statute. The enforcement mechanism is not "arbitrate or else you can't log on anymore." However most of these silicon valley arbitration clauses do include an exception for small claims. I haven't looked at FB's though.
Oof okay that's really good to know--thank you for the correction!!
Not entirely applicable in this case, but I had a similar situation with Google (they claimed I owe them money, no way to actually pay, let alone challenge it). Eventually it went to a collections agency who do have humans working for them, did reply and cancelled the 'debt' immediately when I provided evidence.
Google, Facebook, etc might not want to talk to their customers. But adjacent companies might.
Other than all the courts/suing discussion, handling undeserved charges on your bill is exactly what your credit card company is supposed to do. The whole "they use different vendors" thing should be their problem, not yours. Press them again and tell them to take care of the problem regardless of which processor (and how many) they originate from.
Filing for arbitration can be even easier. Both will likely be effective.
Have you read the relevant terms of service? Do they require using some arbitration service instead?
note: Even if the dispute is settled out of court in arbitration, I think arbitration would likely be successful based on the available info. Honestly, if you can open a dispute for arbitration that seems cheaper than going to court and it's likely to work, IMHO. Though most likely is that as soon as a human at Facebook actually groks your situation they'll refund it before going to court or arbitration.
Can you read the terms of service for this without logging in?
Note that these arbitration clauses aren’t necessarily enforceable and small claims judges can and do exercise a lot of discretion in their judgements.
Even if arbitration is in play, it would cost Facebook more to hire a lawyer to go to small claims court and have it moved to arbitration than it would to just settle the $300 at stake hear.
First, where are you? In the US? What state?
Small Claims Court in California tends to be effective. The great thing about filing a small claims court case is that the other party has to either settle, or show up in court. They do not have the option of ignoring this. They have to send someone, or lose by default.
Most small claims courts have online instructions on how to file, and many will accept filings on line. Here's California's page: [1]
Facebook reportedly no longer requires arbitration.
[1] https://selfhelp.courts.ca.gov/small-claims-california
Small claims is an excellent option. Or alternatively take them to arbitration if the ToS provides for it. Either way the expense to you will be minimal.
Once you realize that legal is the big tech company’s first line tech support things go considerably more smoothly.
Pro tip: get on privacy.com. Give FB (or anyone online) a temporary credit card from there, rather than your "real" one.
If you're really done using their services, you can just close the card. Once the card gets declined, they will notice, believe me.
Further tip: for most things (maybe not for FB), the name & address you give are also not checked; just the card number, expiration, security code, and zip code.
Of course, you might be giving your real address and/or phone number somewhere else on the site, if you want to get something physical shipped to you.
Be careful with this. Being unable to charge your credit card does not mean a contract between you and the business has been terminated or that your financial responsibility went away. Regardless of how difficult it is to reach them and hit the cancel button.
We've had this conversation before.
Nothing's ever happened to me, and I've been doing it for years. Yes, they could come after you. If you're worried about that, feel free to keep getting fleeced.
Some companies will keep charging and sell the debt to a collection agency...which can affect your credit.
As far as I know, it cannot (legally) affect your credit if you have disputed the charges, and the debt collectors are not allowed to continue contacting you.
I tested this theory out ~20 years ago. Things may have changed since then.
At any rate, after you have called them, sent their legal dept a delivery receipt letter, issued chargebacks against multiple of their shell credit card processing accounts, and cancelled your credit card, it is going to be difficult for them to actually collect anything for the unwanted services they provided after the initial cancellation (even in arbitration).
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Thank you all for the useful comments and feedback. I noted some people asking where I am from: BC, Canada. I am not sure how much this changes from the legal standpoint. But I will carefully review all your feedback, and proceed carefully with different options provided. Should I create another post about how this will get resolved, or simply reply again to this thread? Much appreciated.
Can’t you just file a chargeback for every fraudulent charge?
I had a similar thing happen, where an account that I use only to run ads and never post anything was flagged as a bot. I eventually got through to a person on chat who was entirely unhelpful, but in the survey after I just typed out my issue in every text box. A few days later my account was unbanned and I could log in and stop the ads. Kinda mind blowing process to be honest, probably won't be doing business with them again.
If your business is incorporated, you might not be able to take the small claims court route. You need to double-check the rules for your state; some only allow natural persons as small claims plaintiffs.
What would otherwise be a slam-dunk could end up being a waste of time if you show up and the judge decides the wrong party filed the suit (you personally vs. the business associated with the Facebook ads account).
Unless you are in a jurisdiction where Facebook has some actual presence, a small claims court isn't going to be able to do anything.
What jurisdiction can you purchase Facebook ads in that doesn't count that fact as Facebook having a presence?
If they allow you to buy ads, they're liable to follow the local countries laws, it's very simple.
I am in the exact same boat.. and someone hijacked the account and actually activated ad services. They have thus far been unresponsive and I really don't have it in me to rebuild 18 years of social networking. I may have to give this demand letter deal a shot.
Seems feasible from a layman’s perspective, but might not from a lawyer’s. Why not talk to one?
Put a freeze on that card and get a new one? Inconvenient as it might be, works every time.
This does not typically work. See Visa Account Updater [1] and similar services from other networks.
[1] https://developer.visa.com/use-cases/identify-merchants-rece...
You can ask your banks to not perform this update. I've had success with Amex and Citi. Depends a bit on whether the customer service rep knows what you're talking about, but it's very possible.
Some payment processors will update the company charging with the new card information. Getting a new card does not absolve you from the contractual obligation you agreed to in order to use the ad platform. Sad.
> Getting a new card does not absolve you from the contractual obligation you agreed to in order to use the ad platform.
However, for better or worse, possession is 9/10ths of the law
By the same token the contract probably also stipulated that it could be cancelled in a way that Facebook is currently blocking. I don't think any court would hold that the purchaser is now required to pay for services perpetually.
While true in some instances, I'm pretty sure Facebook requires that payment information is valid in order to serve ongoing campaign(s).
If this is true, then cancel the credit card, and get one from someone else.
Later, reapply for the one you cancelled. They’d love to have you back.
(Though, honestly, I’ve never had this problem where I say “this charge is unauthorized, please treat my number as stolen to prevent further fraud”, and then the bank says, “OK, but we have to continue to honor payments the thief set up with the old number”)
Patio11 would beg to disagree
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/improving-cards-under...
IANAL, but if you need to do this on the cheap, perhaps start with your state AG?
I am all in favor of suing FB but one way to stop this is to pay all dues and close your card before the next payment happens.
You’re trying to recover lost ad revenue or the amount of money you paid in advertising because you can’t cancel your account?
> making it difficult for the credit card company to stop these transactions.
I would of had them cancel the card and issue a brand new one.
Dispute each charge with your bank. Give them the evidence that they have not responded to your attempts to contact them.
Stop the credit card immediately. Get rid of the card; not new number. This staunches the flow.
This harms your credit rating
Depends on a lot of things, but getting the card reissued with a new number wouldn't.
Closing a card that was younger than your average card shouldn't.
Anyway, being willing to walk away from the credit card account is key to getting the credit card company to help you more, if they aren't helping enough. "i'd like to close my account, because you can't stop the unauthorized charges from X" is a pretty clear message.
> Depends on a lot of things, but getting the card reissued with a new number wouldn't.
Reporting it lost and getting the card reissued with a new number doesn't solve the problem anymore. Banks and card issuers are starting to share information with services that report updated card numbers to recurrent billers like the Wall Street Journal.
These started popping up around the time every business model became subscription-based. When you want to capture anything, block all the exits first.
You cannot get away from them unless you close the account.
Cancel your credit card (report it as lost) - Facebook will soon chase
I would take them to small claims court for sure. That's abusive.
I'd contact a few news agencies in your city, see if someone wants to pick it up as a human interest story. Maybe call up your reps in Congress, one of them might like an excuse to rail against tech companies.
Cancel the credit card and take them to small claims.
Hey I built getdispute.com to do literally exactly this: sue big companies in small claims court easily.
First, I strongly recommend sending them a demand letter. You can generate one for free on getdispute.com/products/demand-letter and/or pay us a few bucks to mail it.
Second, physically mail the letter to their legal address. The mail goes to someone in legal tasked with reading the mail.
90% of our cases end here. A correctly written demand letter, sent by physical mail usually gets noticed and resolved very quickly.
If nothing happens after a few weeks (give it 3-4 wks) then you could file a case in court. This will require you to file the case, pay the filing fee, and then serve the defendant via a 3rd party process server. Could all be done in 1 day if you know what you're doing. If you serve the defendant (FB) correctly, they are now obligated to show up to court or otherwise risk a default judgement against them that cannot be reversed later.
Another 50-75% of cases end here as most defendants prefer to settle out of court.
If they don't respond, you will need to go to your court date and explain the case to the judge. Usually, without a defendant appearing, the court will grant a default judgement in your favor, assuming the judge decides they do in fact have jurisdiction. To be safe on jurisdiction, file in the county FB does business, or otherwise has a legal entity registered.
All of this said... it's probably not worth the time/money to do more than send a demand letter. It is probably worth your time to send a physical demand letter.
Good luck. 2.7m small claims court cases are filed each year in the US, approx 50% by individuals. So you're in good company.
I see that your website asks $9 + $10/month for the basics package.
I've never once had the need to write a demand letter, so if I ever need to, I'd expect to be a one time thing. I definitely won't need a monthly service.
How does that work in this case? Does it mean I'd pay $19 and then cancel the monthly service?
There is a one time option (just click the tab at top of screen that says one time).
Alternatively, you can cancel immediately if you'd like. It's standard stripe portal with 2 clicks or so. You will get a renewal reminder 7 days before it charges next month.
People who subscribe tend to find a lot of little annoyances with companies/refunds/travel stuff (airlines are a big one) that more than pays for the subscription. But feel free to use as is best for you.
You say airlines are a big part of your business model. Do you only work with US airlines or do you support letters for EU261 rules as well? I'm a very frequent flyer and never had many issues with getting compensation from domestic airlines but European airlines are an entirely different story. I've found the best experience has been paid services that take a huge cut like Airhelp, so it would be nice to not pay 35% every time I have an issue.
AirHelp [1] has built a business around EU261 claims.
[1] https://www.airhelp.com/en/
Yep, I mentioned them in my comment. Though they are effective, they take a huge chunk of change.
I'd consider filing something against Frontier for a gate employe giving me wrong information (I have it documented) resulting monetary loss. But then I was afraid they'd blacklist me from flying. As much as I don't want to fly them, they have a lot of flights out of my city.
Have you heard of airlines doing that?
FWIW I did contact their CS & social media and basically got told "too bad you got some wrong info..."
Agreed with this. IMO, it should charge a one time fee to handle it all, and probably more than $19. I can't see many people suing folks monthly. Charge me $40 or $50 and take care of everything for me!
There is a one time option (click one-time at top) and it is $35!
Neat. I'm definitely bookmarking this.
I personally think you could charge more if needed. Dealing with legalese and paperwork is a huge, huge headache to most people. Nicely done.
They rely on you forgetting to cancel. Then when you notice a few months later, you demand a refund. They won’t give it to you, necessitating that you resubscribe in order to send them a demand letter. #growthhacking
Not really. We have Stripe send a recharge reminder 7 days before it happens next month with an option to unsubscribe through Stripe subscription portal in 2ish clicks. No cancellation reason asked.
I've done plenty of growth hacking before, and our subscription flow is not trying to do that.
Both parties have adverse selection issues.
First: customers looking for their service are likely to be noisy and costly if the business screws them. The business is selecting for fractious customers so the business needs to be careful.
Secondly: the business is a specialist in the art of dealing with small claims. If a customer needs to make a small claim against the business, the business understands the system in depth, and can defend itself better than most. Although I would also expect the business understands the financial costs better, and perhaps are more refund friendly than other businesses might be.
If they don't refund, take them to small claims court
You joke but we'd write you a letter for that.
Would you still formally ship it or just walk over to the incoming mail box?
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IANAL, but:
>they are now obligated to show up to court or otherwise risk a default judgement against them that cannot be reversed later.
Is definitely untrue. You can appeal a default judgement and win. Ask me how I know.
(Edit: attempt to fix formatting)
Does that apply to small-claims court?
IANAL—yes. Appellate process looks into whether or not the judge followed the law when making the ruling/judgement.
Smalls Claims Court is still a court, and the rulings are still subject to the laws of the land.
From a practical matter, you will spend more in legal fees appealing than what is in the judgement.
How do you know?
(I genuinely want to hear this story)
Late reply, sorry.
My company got a default judgement in small claims court ($3k) that I only learned about months after it happened because the state of California had a totally wrong address (mixed up with some other company) in their database. So I was served at some random address that was fortunately only 50 miles from me; “fortunate” because I still had to appear at that county’s courthouse to make any appeal.
The fact that The California State Corporations Board had the wrong address had no bearing on my appeal - that was “my fault” for not monitoring it and having it corrected.
So I filed for an actual appeal, appeared before the judge with the plaintiff (and a lawyer on my side that cost $2500), and won the appeal on the merits of the case. Had I not won, the state would have issued a bill and denied the business renewal unless paid.
It was an utterly bogus claim by a plaintiff that admitted he made a hobby of small claims court. Most of his cases he won because he defendants never showed up; as I didn’t originally because of the wrong service address.
Two lessons: check the state records for your business religiously (because it’s your fault if they get it wrong, no matter what), and fight the claim no matter what or you’ll become a target for future small-claims rewards because the judgements are public information.
OP explicitly said in their post that they've already sent a physical demand letter:
> I wrote a letter twice, and sent in the mail via postage, with tracking, which was delivered, to cancel my Ad services and provide a refund. No response however.
They sent "a letter" twice. Not necessarily a specific demand letter and not necessarily to legal. At this point details like that matter.
^ This. Physically mailing the letter makes a difference. (Been there, done that).
I achieved my quickest, simplest, most pleasant customer service interaction yet with an airline by writing a letter explaining what they did (with transaction IDs, confirmation numbers, etc), and what they should have done. The situation was not entirely simple, and I was not looking forward to explaining it verbally to a rep.
They sent me back a simple letter a couple weeks later saying they'd resolved the issue the way I requested and provided me the updated documentation.
I'll definitely consider this approach next time something like this happens.
Sounds like you’d do very well as a QA professional
I keep this article in my bookmarks re: how to write a proper complaint letter. It talks specifically about credit reporting agencies, but a lot of what he says can be applied anywhere else: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2017/09/09/identity-theft-credit-r...
The last sentences read like the opening header on a landing page.
That’s a cool business.
How well does this work for medical bills?
I have $4000+ in collections because insurance didn't pay for what they were supposed to, and the hospital decided to send it to collections. Should I send the demand letter to the collector, hospital, or insurance?
There is a book I recently purchased called "Never Pay The First Bill". It covers this exact kind of scenario and tells you what to do step by step, all the way up to small claims court, though you usually don't need to go that far. Highly recommended.
More than likely you're going to need to get an itemized bill from the hospital listing the actual icd-10 charge codes and amounts for each service. Then you will need to cross reference this with your insurance's Explanation of Benefits document, which shows what the insurer paid for each code and the remaining that you owe. If there are any codes missing, there has been a miscommunication between the hospital and insurance, and the insurance was not billed for something. It is also possible there will be errors in the codes themselves, charging you for things you did not receive or received less than they said (charge code for 1 hr complex appointment when your appointment was 10 minutes). In this case, you will need to request your medical records, and cross reference them with the charge codes to dispute the wrong codes.
It also tells you how to deal with collection agencies.
I have not run into the problem of insurance denying charges for things they are supposed to cover, but I have tried (years ago) to cross-reference my medical bills with my EoBs and gave up as nothing ever really matched up.
You need to request the HCFA (maybe this has finally gone away after ~10 years) or CMS-1500 claim form for outpatient (like a clinic or same-day surgery or medical imaging) or UB-04 claim form for inpatient (hospital/skilled nursing stay) service.
The actual claims are generated and sent electronically as 837 or 837P formatted garbage (just look up the standard) by all but the tiniest providers but virtually any billing software can generate the equivalent "paper" form.
EoB quality depends on your insurance carrier; if they don't provide a breakdown with the original charge codes and diagnosis codes and a coverage decision then complain and request a more detailed explanation.
The most confusing part is the adjustments; every year the insurance companies and service providers in the U.S. waste a horrific amount of time and effort negotiating adjustment (discount) rates per insurance carrier (insurance always pays less than face value) and charge code. The provider picks prices that give them an overall net positive revenue given the set of adjustments from their (predicted) patient population and corresponding insurance carrier spread, so none of the prices or adjustments actually make any marketplace sense.
If you end up having to fully pay a bill that insurance won't cover, try to offer the provider ~50% and they'll be pretty happy to write off the difference since they wouldn't get much more from insurance. There are also often payment plans and other assistance available if you ask the billers.
I mean, I'll get a bill from my doctor (actually his group practice or whatever) it will list services that I recognize, show what the insurance paid, and what I owe (if anything). It usually looks about right and I have just not ever found that the time needed to audit that against the EoB statements has ever been worth it. The times I tried I got a headache and gave up but like I said it was years ago, well before ACA or any possible reforms that might have been made in the area of transparency in health care/insurance billing reports.
It is supposed to. It is supposed to be the exact same codes. If that is not the case then you were mis-billed, which according to that book is a common occurance.
20+ years ago, I was in a situation that, at this high level anyway, was similar to what you're describing. The collections agency had also put a black mark on my credit history. I don't recall the details, but to whatever extent I did contact the medical provider or the insurance company, they claimed to be unable to help me. (I no longer owed them money, afterall.) The amount I supposedly owed was some hundreds of dollars, not thousands.
After repeatedly failing to have any success communicating with the collections agency, I sent a letter to the Better Business Bureau about the situation. The collector stopped contacting me and my credit history was restored. I never spoke with a lawyer about it and don't know if my approach to addressing the problem was typical.
From my experience, I would suggest that you take the fight to the collector. They are the ones to whom you currently supposedly owe money. (I did not attempt to sue anyone, though, and maybe that detail, or others, would change the answer for your specific situation.)
> The collections agency had also put a black mark on my credit history.
This doesn't seem to be true. According to Experian, the original _creditor_ is the one that puts the black mark on your credit history when they sell your debt to a collections agency. (Typically for pennies on the dollar.)
> After repeatedly failing to have any success communicating with the collections agency, I sent a letter to the Better Business Bureau about the situation. The collector stopped contacting me and my credit history was restored. I never spoke with a lawyer about it and don't know if my approach to addressing the problem was typical.
At a guess, the collections agency might have decided it wasn't worth fighting you over it for a few hundred dollars and dropped your case to spend more time on larger targets. But I don't see how they (or the BBB) could have fixed your credit report, they don't have the power to do that.
> I would suggest that you take the fight to the collector.
I mean, you can try but you are unlikely to succeed. These people are (usually) skilled negotiators, they can't easily be outfoxed or convinced to be on your side. Their only goal is to get money from you. The dirty secret that the collections agencies don't want people to know is that nobody has any actual obligation to pay them. They buy bad debt and hope they can convince you to pay them. The ONLY leverage they have is the ability to guilt and intimidate. Some agencies engage in shady behavior (calling friends and neighbors, making threats). These behaviors are generally illegal, but the kind of people who fall that far into debt are generally not the kind of people who can afford to take legal action against a lawyered-up agency.
You never HAVE to pay a collections agency, and even if you do, the debt NEVER gets paid back to the original creditor, just the agency collecting it. Neither will paying them fix your credit report in any way.
If you have debt that was legitimately defaulted on and made its way all the way to a collections agency, the very best thing to do is not engage them. They will give up eventually. They _might_ try to help if the debt wound up in collections due to a creditor's mistake, but I wouldn't bet too much on it.
> > The collections agency had also put a black mark on my credit history.
> This doesn't seem to be true.
Maybe the situation has changed over the past couple decades. (I don't recall which of the three credit reporting agencies this was with.) It was true for me back then. :)
In my case, the collector didn't initiate contact. I learned of the situation because I checked my credit report and then it was I who contacted them. I didn't know who they were or why they thought I owed them money. They tried to convince me to pay them, saying they'd remove the mark from my credit report after I did so.
I had believed the medical service (a couple years in the past at that time) had been completely covered by insurance and didn't know that anyone thought money was owed. I don't know where the original miscommunication/mistake had occurred. I only know that the collector dinged my credit report and that I had documentation showing that my insurance had addressed the original claim (paying the medical provider), which enabled me to challenge the collection agency's assertion.
(Thank you for the additional information and context you've added about collection agencies. I knew little about them outside of my direct experience with this one.)
Healthcare is more complicated and it might be worth talking to an attorney (pay for an hour of time) to get advice on which party to pursue and how. This is unfortunately the biggest challenge with our service... how can we help people when it gets more complex.
You should contact your state's insurance regulator. They're very powerful and generally get proper reactions from insurance companies.
Just a note that you should add https:// to your links so we can click on them!
Are there equivalent services in the EU and the UK?
You honestly don't need one in the UK, filing small claims via the governments site is very easy. They'll auto send a demand letter for you etc. https://www.gov.uk/make-court-claim-for-money
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>Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Uh this is not the case... and also most of my comments on HN are not about my company.
The only evidence I can point out: the OP is not concisely written and disputes $300... not the best selling points.
I'd love to crack down hard on unscrupulous behavior in tech companies. But the kind of penalties I have in mind demands due process and default presumption of innocence. Which means not making accusations based on only a hunch.
In this example, how can the question be investigated quietly?
guerilla marketing strategy is crazy
I too, once had a 2 day old account as did you, correlation != causation.
I may be in the minority here, but while I empathize with you over the indignity of it I don't think this would be a slam-dunk case for you unless their agent just doesn't bother to show.
You paid them to serve ads. They presumably served the ads as promised, and your store is currently benefiting from the ads. "But I didn't want them" doesn't get you far when you previously signed a recurrent-billing contract.
If this gets all the way to a judge, on paper, it'll look like you just failed to stop service. You'll argue it was impossible. They'll reply with "you could have gone to [some form on some obscure page]" to cancel. The icing on the cake will be "you would have known if you read the terms and conditions you signed."
Skip that humiliation and re-read the terms and conditions to see if there's some specific rain dance you have to do to end the contract.
If nobody here can work some magic on your behalf, I would suggest you cancel your credit card and cut your losses ($300 is less than a speeding ticket or runaway AWS bill). The time involved in filing and the mere cost of parking at the courthouse once or twice is going to claim a chunk of that anyway, if you win.
If you're really bitter, file chargebacks. You can always bypass blacklists by playing at synthetic identity fraud (start using androgynous nicknames for yourself, typoed versions of your last name and addresses of friends/family on all future applications for anything to fuzz the credit bureaus).
There's a reason everything is now subscription-based with an obfuscated cancellation process-- we've found a way to institutionalize negative option billing. Welcome to America.
ed: I started poking around at it for you just for fun. I lost faith in the legal system so long ago that I forgot all about the joys of arbitration! You definitely wouldn't win at kangaroo court.
https://www.facebook.com/legal/commercial_terms
> You agree to arbitrate Commercial Claims between you and Meta Platforms, Inc. This provision does not cover any commercial claims relating to violations of your or our intellectual property rights, including, but not limited to, copyright infringement, patent infringement, trademark infringement, violations of the Brand Usage Guidelines, violations of your or our confidential information or trade secrets, or efforts to interfere with our Products or engage with our Products in unauthorized ways (for example, automated ways). If a Commercial Claim between you and Meta Platforms, Inc. is not subject to arbitration, you agree that the claim must be resolved exclusively in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California or a state court located in San Mateo County, and that you submit to the personal jurisdiction of either of these courts for the purpose of litigating any such claim.
This is extremely poor advice. Demand letter + small claims court is definitely the way to go. Contact the bar association in your county or state, they may be able to direct you to low cost legal help (a litigation clinic at a law school? Who knows) or a lawyer.
You're confident that mine is "extremely poor advice," but you don't seem too sure of your own proposals.
"Extremely. Definitely. May be. Who knows."
If you're European, frame it as a GDPR issue. You have the legal right to correct your information.
Mail dpo@facebook.com, asking them to correct this, explaining them you have tried normal channels, and reminding them they have one month to reply. Failure to do so means you can lodge a complaint with your local data protection instance.
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Close your credit card account.
And while your at it, cancel your phone number?
Well, Facebook (and most other websites) is a private corporate premises, they can certainly stop doing business with anyone for any legal reason (e.g. they just don't like you).
Taking money from you is a different matter, of course. But they don't have any obligations to provide you their services.
The terms of service are a contract, so yes they do, subject to that contract and applicable law.