If the business has a physical presence somewhere, it's not hard. In California, you can get an order to the Sheriff for a "till tap" or an "8 hour keeper". A till tap means a sheriff's deputy or two show up and take the money out of the cash register. A "keeper" means they stand next to the cashier all day and take in money as customers pay. There are fees for this, a few hundred dollars, and they're added to the judgement, so the creditor doesn't end up paying.

The keeper can accept cash and checks, but not credit or debit cards.[1] So, while the keeper is present, the business cannot accept card payments. This disrupts most businesses so badly that they desperately scramble to come up with cash to pay their debt.[2] It gets the message across to management very effectively.

I've done this once. I got paid in full.

[1] https://sfsheriff.com/services/civil-processes/levies/carry-...

[2] https://www.grundonlaw.com/the-power-of-till-taps-debt-colle...

That will really depend on the business. You can absolutely escalate to seizing their assets (including legal fees for the whole process) assuming you can locate them. If they take the stonewalling to the extreme and have a physical location in many (most? all?) US jurisdictions you can show up with the sheriff and a box truck and start physically taking their things as compensation. There's bodycam footage of this if you're curious.

You request the judge to apply a lien on their assets. You take that to their bank and request that it be applied, and the money paid out.

If that doesn't work, you can always go to the police/bailiff with the court order and schedule a date/time for them to go with you to their offices to seize and auction off their stuff.

does Murica not have bailiffs?

small claims court might not work against a dodgy builder, but it will certainly work against a company, with physical offices

if they don't pay up, you can literally walk into their offices and start taking their stuff, with the police supporting you

I'd start with the contents of Amodei's office

I sat in small claims court one day to watch.

A plaintiff won a judgment. He asked the judge: “what do I do now?” The judge replied: “well, if you’re reading the paper one day and see ‘defendant wins the Powerball,’ then you know exactly what to do.”

I remember someone attempting to sue my minor stepdaughter in small claims (which isn't a thing in WA, if you want to sue a minor you have to go to "real" court, but that's another matter).

Everyone all files in for the session and the Judge patiently explains... "we do not do enforcement here, to be very clear. A judgment in small claims means the court agrees you are owed what is owed in the judgment, no more. You can contain the Sheriff's Department, etc., for arranging enforcement of the judgment..."

Sure as shit, first case on the docket is some landlord/tenant dispute. Gets figured out and one of the parties is awarded $1,200... Very next comment out of his mouth, "Where do I go to pick up that check?" Judge, with a sigh, "As I explained twelve minutes ago, small claims court does not do enforcement". "I thought I went up front and picked up my check and then you got the money from him." "No. I am ... unclear ... why you think that would be the case."

I found myself wryly amused by this. Like the court is just cutting checks for every awarded verdict and "oh, we'll figure out how to make the loser pay somehow, but here, you don't need to worry about that, here's your check".

I'm surprised UK law doesn't prohibit retaliation against the customer for insisting on his legal rights.

Not petty of you IMO. It's what everyone ought to do but it's inconvenient so most people don't.

I grew up when we owned game systems and the games, and they couldn't phone home to see if I still had permission to play. I was recently considering installing Steam but this kind of thing gave me pause. I couldn't invest any money in something that could have the rug pulled out from at any time.

I can tell you first-hand (from the side doing the banning) that you’re wrong.

You’re not going to get an email telling you that you’re banned. Your payments will just start being declined, and they won’t be able to help you. They’ll suggest you try another card. That won’t work either.

Maxmind includes a “chargeback risk score” in the api response for everybody who uses their minfraud service. They’re not doing that because companies don’t use it.

Yeah unless you refute ebay.

A scammer went to the trouble of creating an entirely different ebay account registered to literally "pirate[xxxxx]@..." using my same name. Then they found a tracking number to my same zip code. Then they bought (fake) items from a second scammer account using my stolen credit card to "wash" the money.

When I filed a chargeback ebay came back with a fat stack of paperwork and absolutely fucking buried me. They had the tracking number to "me", they had "me", they had the invoices to "me", they had my credit card, and their lengthy report had all the right words in all the right places and dressed up in all the right banking mumbo-jumbo and they convinced my bank so well that my bank suggested I was a fraudster myself and then my bank closed my accounts. I couldn't even sue them because at that precise time I moved cross country and couldn't get to the court to sue them in. I ended up eating the better part of $1000.

Ebay is absolutely fucking savage at chargebacks. They appear to have people trained specifically to bury in paperwork anyone that tries to challenge fraudulent charges.

maybe. but somebody has to manually ban you if you do that. whereas banning everybody who charges back can easily be done in batch on the billing side

You can always ask the judge to add include in the judgement an order that Steam not retaliate by banning or limiting your account.