Ask HN: Suing Facebook in small claims?
Hello dear HN. I am looking for advise,
I have a Facebook account that has been suspended for unknown reasons, other than I somehow 'broke' the community standards.
It is unclear to me which ones however. When I try to re-log in I am stopped by an endless AI bot, and cannot get a hold of a real person.
I am still paying monthly for Facebook Ads for my small business. However, I cannot log in to cancel these Ads. 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.
I attempted emailing FB several time to legal@facebook.com. And 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.
Should I proceed to small claims court to recover about $300 of lost Ad revenue, for a service which I can no longer use? I am still being billed to. Does anybody have any experience with this?
186 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadHowever, for better or worse, possession is 9/10ths of the law
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”)
[1] https://developer.visa.com/use-cases/identify-merchants-rece...
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/improving-cards-under...
I feel for the OP, but this won't stick to the man. It'll stick to the op.
Agreed about the FB blacklist though. Sometimes I think I should set up a bunch of shell LLCs for my consumer accounts.
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.
Once you realize that legal is the big tech company’s first line tech support things go considerably more smoothly.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
I would of had them cancel the card and issue a brand new one.
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.
It's remarkably twitchy in some ways, and remarkably blind in others.
They are vile.
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.
That’s a cool business.
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 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?
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.)
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.
> 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.)
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.
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'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?
I personally think you could charge more if needed. Dealing with legalese and paperwork is a huge, huge headache to most people. Nicely done.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.airhelp.com/en/
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..."
> 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 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)
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.
(I genuinely want to hear this story)
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.
The only evidence I can point out: the OP is not concisely written and disputes $300... not the best selling points.
In this example, how can the question be investigated quietly?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Taking money from you is a different matter, of course. But they don't have any obligations to provide you their services.
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.
After sending a demand letter, this is the best advice in this thread.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
If they allow you to buy ads, they're liable to follow the local countries laws, it's very simple.