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Man who created own credit card sues bank for not sticking to terms (2013)
- usaphp 11y agoHe dropped the charges for 24Mln soon after Tinkoff started a fraud case against him [1], nobody really knows what happened later but they probably got some sort of agreement and he got a compensation. 1: http://www.gazeta.ru/business/2013/08/14/5555829.shtml http://www.gazeta.ru/business/2013/08/14/5555829.shtml
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- argonaut 11y agoIt seems to me both sides dropped the case, and no money changed hands. https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ru&u=https://www.tinkoff.ru/about/news/14082013-conflict-resolved/&prev=search https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ru&u=https:/...
- pascalmemories 11y agoThey settled for undisclosed terms - http://fhstheprint.com/2097/news/russian-man-takes-it-to-the-bank/ http://fhstheprint.com/2097/news/russian-man-takes-it-to-the... However, he felt his life was under threat, which may have helped the bank's negotiating power - after all, it is Russia. https://www.rt.com/business/tinkoff-bank-agarkov-credit-299/ https://www.rt.com/business/tinkoff-bank-agarkov-credit-299/ A good example of why you should be sure your country is a safe place for contract disputes to be dealt with by the courts and not by men with ski masks and AK47s.
- mahgnous 11y agoNot sure how this constitutes fraud? Since when can't you alter the terms of a contract? It's not his fault they didn't read it. They sure hold other people accountable when they don't read theirs.
- m_eiman 11y agoIf you modify a form letter before sending it back without notifying the other party of the changes, I'd say it's reasonable that the contract is either invalid or should be treated as unmodified.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoModification is notification.
- vog 11y agoCare to elaborate?
- jsprogrammer 11y agoIs there more to elaborate on? How else would one notify of a modified contract, but by producing the modified contract? It is not the receiving party's responsibility to determine if something they receive is another party's form letter, or other spam-like.
- argonaut 11y agoObviously, none of us know what specific language he used in talking to the bank, and IANAL, but if the bank said something along the lines of "here's the contract we'd like you to sign", and he replied along the lines of "here's the contract I've signed that I'd like you to sign", it would be acting in bad faith to not tell the bank you've changed the contract.
- jsprogrammer 11y agoA contract is not enforceable if it was not read by both parties accepting it. If banks don't read what they sign...fuck'em.
- eccstartup 11y agoReally really old story.
- jlebrech 11y agoMaybe they had reasonable expectations of non-modification.
- emn13 11y agoAs opposed to bank clients, who apparently have no reasonable expectations that a contract doesn't contain nasty traps hidden in dense legalese. I'd say if a contract is so long and convoluted that the drafting party can't be bothered to manually verify it's still valid when returned, they have no business drafting that contract in the first place. After all, it's hardly reasonable to assume the other party read it, apparently.
- hugh4 11y agoNot at all. Bank clients are also afforded similar protection. There's a concept known as an unconscionable contract, which is a contract that a reasonable person would not sign. Courts generally take a dim view of the enforceability of any contract which wasn't actively agreed to and understood by both parties. And that's why I don't worry, when I click that I have read and understood some agreement that I definitely haven't, that I might be agreeing to being part of a human centipede.
- jarek 11y agoThough it should be noted that in such a system the bigger/stronger/more active party still has an advantage as they are more likely to have experience and resources to go to courts. E.g., poor people are unlikely to take a payday lender to court
- jessaustin 11y agoPerhaps payday lenders are a more evocative target, but credit card companies are far worse offenders with respect to complicated, ever-changing contracts. Actually there have been some payday lenders where the only penalty for not making all required payments is not being able to get a new loan. You don't need a deceptive contract for that.
- LoSboccacc 11y agoI'd be more interested in an update
- anovikov 11y agoWell, i think printing out a paper that looked like original except it wasn't an original does constitute a fraud. Or at least it can be proven with some effort. Nothing suggested to the bank that the document has been modified.
- cromulent 11y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6175059 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6175059
- cosmolev 11y agoSince then Tinkoff bank has adopted the OCR technology from ABBYY and now scans all the letters sent back to the bank to detect any changes.
- scotty79 11y agoWhy don't they send already signed copies?
- verganileonardo 11y agoThey probably don't spend time doing a complete (credit, fraud, etc) analysis before a potential client shows interest in the product.
- eyeJam 11y agoI'm just starting law school so take what I'm saying with a grain of salt, but this is a pretty interesting case since I'm studying offer and acceptance right now in contracts class. It's a bit difficult to analyze this since the facts are scarce. A good case to look at for reference is Butler Machine Tool v. Ex-Cell-O Corporation. The variations Arganov proposed in his counter-offer were pretty extreme: he made significant changes to the material terms. He also didn't appear to do anything to bring Tinkov's attention to these variations and made the counter-offer look very similar to the initial offer (i.e: it looked almost identical). I don't see any mention that he highlighted the variations, or included a note bringing Tinkov's attention to them, or asked Tinkov to initial beside them. At this point, I would say that Tinkov didn't consent to the variation and had assumed that Arganov had accepted their original offer. BUT, since they apparently gave him the unlimited line of credit he had included in his counter-offer, it seems pretty conclusive that by their conduct they had in fact accepted Arganov's counter-offer. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butler_Machine_Tool_Co_Ltd_v_Ex-Cell-O_Corp_(England)_Ltd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butler_Machine_Tool_Co_Ltd_v_E...]
- orless 11y agoAccording to Russian media, he has scanned the document an replaced passages in a graphic editor (like Photoshop).
- anonbanker 11y agoThanks for doing my homework for me. What book are they using for your contracts class?
- kelvin0 11y agoMy new hero. Awesome move to feed the bank a bit of their own dog food.
- yodon 11y agoContract negotiation is kind of like a distributed version control problem, where each party maintains their own private internal revision stack and occasionally publishes versions out to the "main" branch (frequently hoping those changes don't get noticed). The crew at ClearContract [0] have built a pretty slick system for managing this kind of "adversarial version control" environments. [0] http://clearcontract.com http://clearcontract.com
- HiLo 11y agoThat's a pretty interesting solution to a pretty interesting problem. This happens all the time in the physical commodities markets - you insert or remove a document required to make payment on a letter of credit, shorten the time windows for payment, try to get the counterparty to pay for external costs (insurance, port agents, bunkers, fines, and an entire department just for this type of thing as it concerns demurrage), and so on. So the problem is obviously there, and believe it or not, even among the least tech-savvy everybody is aware of this problem, how it's done, and current methods to minimize it. It's very important. For example, look at Vitol, the biggest energy trading house in the world (followed by Glencore and Trafigura, both split from the same company). This doesn't include metals or ags. Vitol has $300 billion or so in revenue per year. Strictly looking at their trading business, and considering minimum wholesale volumes around 25,000 barrel lots (barge sizes in the Gulf Coast), so wholesale crude and products trades in blocks worth between $1.5 and $2 million at today's prices. While this is an extremely simplified, ballpark analysis, assuming their trading business has a 2% net margin, they're selling $300 billion that they bought for $294 billion. Roughly, that's about 300,000 transactions for separate, physical movements of petroleum and products. Saving even a few days on payment terms across the board would mean they have to borrow money for a few less days, which would add up to millions of dollars in cash savings that begin to accrue immediately and continue to daily over time. So, again, the problem is there, and various groups have attempted to build software (which actually did work, technically). The big problem is that implementation of these tools has been tried in areas such as Letters of Credit (negotiation between counterparties and banks for each one if doing transactional trade finance) and the rest of trade finance. The problem isn't the tools, it's that the companies kind of like to play this game, because if you see yourself as on the more sophisticated end of the market then this benefits you, and this system is tried and true, whereas the new system could be prone to errors or other unknown unknowns, where they don't know how to protect themselves. edit: By the way, much of the above (especially as it concerns the individual specifications of each order, either physical variables in the commodities markets or financial variables in the bond and derivatives markets) is exactly the reason implementation of more streamlined alternatives for clearing and settlement have been so slow. It's not that the technology for actually doing it isn't there, it's that the bottlenecks leading up to that are still there. So if you have a good way for traders to automatically decide which fees and costs apply when and to who, please do tell, but then you've effectively automated the traders, as much of what they do is negotiating those terms.
- orless 11y agoFor everyone who's sympatetic to Agarkov, imagine someone doing this to you. Agarkov wanted to deceive the bank and took advantage of some bank's clerk not validating the user input. So imagine someone doing this to you. Smuggling some really mean clause into the fine print which you probably won't read. How that would sound? Oh, you read all the fine print? Really? I don't. Last time I've bought a travel insurance for around 10 Euro a year, it came with a 65-page PDF in language which you need to be a specialist to understand. It would have been incredibly easy for them to write in there that I have to sacrifice my first-born to them, or whatever. According to Russian media, Agarkov scanned and altered the original document with an intention to deceive. There's a Russian word "подлог", roughly translated as "forgery", "alteration", "fabrication" into English. So what Agarkov did is exactly "подлог", this is an absolute match if you read the definition in Wikipedia. There is a number of articles in Russian criminal codex concerning this action. The closes to this case is probably nr. 187 about falsification of credit cards or payment documents. Not an exact fit, but close.
- kafkaesq 11y agoLet him try that with a Russian bank, and see what happens.