I don't think you even need to go that far. Just refute the charges with your credit card. Very high likelihood of a successful refund since they already acknowledged their error in writing.

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Arainach 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There's a fundamental power imbalance: if you do this to any service, they will likely ban your account. So the monetary reward has to be enough to merit moving all your data and workflows off them in advance and never using them again.

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pbhjpbhj 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

^ This.

I naively disputed Steam not honouring a refund (it was for about 0.5% of what I've spent with them up to that point), a couple of £pound at most. I'd paid by PayPal and as Steam refused to abide by UK law (Consumer Rights Act says broken stuff has to be fixed or refunded), I raised the issue with PayPal. I expected Steam would refund me, instead they did not dispute that they'd unlawfully failed to refund me, so PayPal - Steam's provider - cancelled the charge.

In response, Steam 'limited' my Steam account - effectively closing it temporarily. Now it's limited so they won't use PayPal to sell me anything now, so I haven't bought anything from them since [I have cashed in CS skins, and used that cash to 'buy' games].

It was an interesting lesson in 'might is right'. PayPal were able to refund the transaction because Steam want them and had no argument against the refund. Steam were able to cut me off because this appears to be a loophole in UK consumer law - sellers who break the law can just dismiss buyers who ask for refunds. Lesson learnt.

From Steam's point of view, they pissed off a customer and probably burnt 30mins-1hour of support time in answering my requests, way more than the cost of the refund. But selling games, which I later found Steam knew was broken, and then not refunding because I had the tenacity to try and fix it - meaning that the game sat open for longer than their auto-refund time - is not on imo. Petty of me for sure. Crap of Steam too.

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fc417fc802 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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Ekaros 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Why should they? Freedom of association is key Western principle. Steam chose not to associate with them anymore. If the user don't like it they should have sued them in court instead.

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fc417fc802 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

If I report my employer for an OSHA violation and they retaliate that's illegal. Of course such laws hardly ever stopped anyone so it's a very bad idea to depend on it but the principle is certainly there.

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Cpoll 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Being able to freely threaten reprisal against people exercising their rights circumvents those rights.

Freedom of association applies to individuals; it's a non-sequiter here.

	▲	fc417fc802 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It's relevant in that businesses generally also enjoy freedom of (non)association but obviously that's not an absolute.

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gblargg 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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boh 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No that's not how that works. This stuff is a non-event. You refute the balance, they have a period where they can defend their claim (8/10 times they don't), you get your money. This is a very basic transaction that happens every single day to every major company. "Banning" you costs more than your refund and has additional legal risks.

I know being helpless against tech companies is a major trope in these comments but this is basic everyday transaction stuff. Plan on being on hold with your credit card company but not being a central target for a trillion dollar AI startup because you asked for a $100 refund.

	▲	notatoad 18 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	mothballed an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.

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lokar 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They won’t ban you for going to small claims court?

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pxx 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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

	▲	andylynch 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Retaliating against someone for asserting their legal rights also gets way riskier what they have already won in litigation.
	▲	lokar 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Good point. one off banning by hand may not be worth the effort, but some code to automate it probably is.

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criddell an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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

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celeritascelery 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I would be that would be highly unlikely to succeed. I have tried to dispute charges with my credit card for similar issues, and they always side with the business. I don’t think I they even check.

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true_religion 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Can companies decide not to serve you on the basis of a successful lawsuit you had against them?

If not, then it might be better to go the small claims court route.

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cute_boi 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

doing charge back means Anthropic will ban you forever.

	▲	fc417fc802 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Probably, but if a business cheated me out of that much I wouldn't be doing business with them again regardless so at least to me it would make no difference.