Have you tried to estimate their profit or gross margin? I think it's wrong to analyze this as stolen goods. It's an opportunity cost. Unless they are fully ut

Have you tried to estimate their profit or gross margin? I think it's wrong to analyze this as stolen goods. It's an opportunity cost. Unless they are fully utilized, the cost is power, cooling, and depreciation on the hardware. Not the market price of what that CPU time would have been sold for. Based on http://www.geekwire.com/2014/heres-startup-dumped-amazon-web-services/ http://www.geekwire.com/2014/heres-startup-dumped-amazon-web... the internal cost might be 50% or even less than market price. You have a habit of positing that because you wouldn't do something means that others wouldn't as well. You can sue a bank for acting in bad faith, which "does not necessarily involve furtive or evil motives, but has a commercial sense of disregard of and refusal to learn the facts when available; and that the circumstances and conditions may be so cogent and obvious that to remain passive amounts to bad faith" - http://caselaw.findlaw.com/ky-court-of-appeals/1496975.html#sthash.HPOfqUcd.dpuf http://caselaw.findlaw.com/ky-court-of-appeals/1496975.html#... . Bear in mind that it's very difficult to extrapolate from a regulated bank to an unregulated company. there are also a lot of banking laws put into place define exactly what bad faith means. For example, it used to be that you were liable for stolen credit card misuse until the time it was reported. The law changed to limit your liability, which placed more emphasis on the bank to do fraud detection. The parallel here is obvious; if as a matter of principle they decided to assume 100% liability, then this gives them inventive to improve fraud detection, which can be done through things like usage analysis. While assuming no liability gives them less inventive to go after fraud. If Amazon wants happy customers, then great service helps - no principle needed. (In addition, the US government requires additional reporting and oversight of your bank account. For example, the bank can be in trouble if they decline to notice a pattern of structuring your transactions to be under the $10,000 reporting limit to the government.)