Do we have a term for things that&#39;s technically legal but practically fraudulent? For example, in Sim Lim cases, customers are tricked into signing a contract where they won't get their phones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sim_Lim_Square However, what the shop did is technically legal. I mean the customer sign a contract. Technically, every time I offer people to download an e-book, for example, I can put terms that people agree to be my slave somewhere on the contract or pay me $1 million dollar. Not that it'll be enforceable in court, or is it? Technically insurance agents can say that the whole money is invested. Somewhere deep in the contract there could be a term saying that there is a fee of 100% of all money put, for example. The last one is pretty real and happen a lot. Another sample could be Trump's university. Most of people there is unhappy with the money. So it's not technically a fraud. It's legal. Just like time share sells. But it's not normal win win trade either. So what is it? Scam?
There are three answers here. First, as is common on this site, you are using the term, "legal" and "illegal." Those are not legally meaningfully terms. A good lawyer won't use those terms to mean allowed or disallowed. We talk in terms of potential civil or criminal liability, or other sanctions and consequences. To say that something is "legal" does not communicate much. Second, all contracts are governed by a duty of good faith. That means that you cannot try to "trick" someone with the terms of the contract and expect to enforce that contract against them and you cannot try to skirt your obligations by finding a tricky form of compliance not within the mutual understanding of the agreement. As with all things, defining good faith is not easy, and depends on the specific context of a situation. It is worth distinguishing between the duty of good faith, and the duties one owes to a fiduciary; good faith is surely far less, but nevertheless still meaningful. Third, a defense to non-performance of a contract is that the agreement as written is unconscionable. A contract that is a grossly unfair deal where the contract was not actively negotiated (i.e. Blindly signing a bad form contract), may fall under this category. Note: I am not your lawyer; this is not legal advice; contact a licensed attorney in your area; do not rely on my statements; I merely am providing a general answer that is academic in nature.
Of course you'd be in legal trouble, the contract is still valid. I also don't know why you don't consider virtual goods to be goods. Take this example: You buy a 1 year subscription for (example) netflix. The next day they cancel your subscription but don't give you the money back because its not a "real good". This should make it clear that virtual goods are goods too in the eyes of the law. Question is if police/lawyers care about it as much as for "real" goods.
If the ability to get a Pannini is conditioned on buying paper towels for money, then he isn't really selling paper towels for $2 and the Pannini for free, he is really selling a package consisting of paper towels and a Pannini for $2, so it would probably still be illegal. The phrase lawyers and judges use to talk about attempts to create loopholes like this one is "too clever by half", which means: "Shrewd but flawed by overthinking or excessive complexity, with a resulting tendency to be unreliable or unsuccessful."
In the United States, no. For something to be illegal in any meaningful way, you have to be able to point to a law that makes it illegal. If there's no law to break, it's not illegal. I would wonder if your colleague was thinking about question of whether cryptocurrencies are legal tender. For something to be "legal tender," there would need to be some kind of law or regulation requiring people to accept them as payment. There is no such requirement in the United States, so Bitcoin, for instance, is not legal tender. But that doesn't make it illegal tender; it just means that people can decide whether to accept it or not.
The EULA is in most jurisdictions a legally binding contract; there is plenty of case law that supports this. You can only be liable under a contract for breaching its terms and only to the extent that the other party suffers harm from that breach. Clearly, if you haven't read the terms then you are greatly increasing the chance that you will inadvertently breach them but not reading them would not, of itself, be a breach and I can't see what harm could flow anyway.
The linked Bloomberg story quotes the rule as: The recipient is allowed to keep the funds if they [the funds] discharge a valid debt, the recipient made no misrepresentations to induce the payment, and the recipient did not have notice of the mistake. If the recipient, or somone acting on behalf of the recipient, hacked the sender to induce the payment, that sounds like a form of misrepresentation to me. If the hacker is unconnected with the recipient there seems no way that the hacker benefits financially, although I suppose a hacker might simply want to cause an amusing disruption. As I understand it this rule only applies when the sender in fact owes a debt to the recipient that the transfer pays off. If the hacker were working for one of a large group of recipients, most of whom are innocent, and subsequent analysis establishes that there was a hacker, but not who the hacker was or which of the many recipients the hacker was working for, I suspect, but cannot prove, that the doctrine would not apply, because the transfer was not a valid but incorrect act by the sender, but was a fraudulent intervention in the sender's procedures.
In general, knowingly making a false statement as part of a commercial or financial transaction, or as part of a contract, with the intention that the other party will rely on that statement and be harmed by this is likely to be fraud. However, there are some limitations. For the lie to be common-law fraud: The other party must in fact rely on the false statement. The other party must suffer harm as a result of relying on the false statement. The reliance must be reasonable. If a seller advertises having new 1957 model cars in 2020, a court might well find that this was so improbable that no reasonable person would have relied on hte statement, and that therefore it is not fraud. Whether the reliance is reasonable depends on the overall facts of the case, and the details might affect what is considered reasonable. In some jurisdictions such a false statement might be actionable false advertising even if it is not fraud. If the US mails are used as part of a fraud or attempted fraud 18 U.S. Code § 1341 applies. This law applies whether any actual harm occured or not, adn whether the victim relied on the false statement or not. It is commonly known as &quot;mail fraud&quot;. 18 U.S. Code CHAPTER 47 is a US Federal law that prohibits a variety of false statements and false documents. Section 1001 of this chapter prohibits false statements and documents &quot;in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States&quot; but I am not clear if this would apply in the case described in the question. Other sections of chapter 47 deal mostly with false statements made to the US Government, or to obtain money or benefits from the government, Or in connection with various particular regulated activities, and do not seem to apply to the case in the question. According to the Justia article on Fraud: Federal fraud statutes, along with most state laws, require proof of a “scheme or artifice” to defraud. The statutes do not provide an explicit definition of these terms, but courts have developed definitions through precedent. The U.S. Supreme Court held in Carpenter v. United States that the terms apply to any plan intended to deprive another of property, regardless of whether it would cause immediate financial harm. However, I think that a scheme such as the one described in the question would be more likely to be prosecuted by a US State than by the US Federal government. Either the state where the maker of the false statements was at the time of the statements, or the state where the victim was present could prosecute.
Why isn't forcing users to accept new Terms of Service by threatening financial loss, (like denying access to purchased content, or inhibiting or prohibiting the ability to earn an income), considered extortion and therefore illegal? Usually this is not illegal, and even if it is, it usually doesn't constitute extortion (or extortion's civil counterpart, which is called &quot;duress&quot;, which is an affirmative defense to contract enforcement). Generally speaking, exercising a legal right someone already has, for a purpose that is not improper, does not constitute extortion. A TOS Rarely Creates A Reasonable Expectation That It Won't Change Most importantly, in the case of terms of service governed information technology services, the firm that creates the terms of service reserves, at the outset, the right to change them at any time. So, the user has no reasonable expectation that the terms of service won't change in a manner that they dislike. There is no implied promise to never change anything material about the service. Terms of service are usually specifically drafted from the outset to avoid creating something that looks like a property interest on the part of the user in having the service continue to work in a particular manner. TOS Terms May Not Be Unconscionable Both the original terms of service and any subsequent amendment of them, is not permitted to be &quot;unconscionable&quot; (e.g. it can't make the life of your first born child a liquidated damages provision that applies if the terms of service are breached). But, there isn't much of a legally protected reliance interest in not having the terms of service changed in this situation (although almost every general rule could conceivably have some exception to it, probably far more factually extreme than the fact patterns identified in the question). If a term is unconscionable, it may not be enforced as contrary to public policy, without regard to what prior versions of the same agreement may have stated. TOS Changes Are Usually Prospective Only On the other hand, a terms of service amendment is generally only effective prospectively and does not generally change rights that have fully accrued and vested prior to their amendment, at least until the user takes some act to affirmatively continue to use the service going forward. When there are vested rights under old versions, the remedy is not to characterize the change as extortion, however. It is to not apply the amendment to the terms of service retroactively to the already vested rights. For example, if the old terms of service did not contain an arbitration clause, and litigation was in progress under the old terms based upon old transactions, and then a new terms of service were adopted that mandated arbitration, this amendment would not generally be applied to require the pending lawsuit in court to be stayed and transferred to an arbitration forum. The right to litigated vested when the lawsuit was filed.