Amazon have charged me for Prime membership without my knowledge I recently discovered that Amazon have charged me for Prime Membership around 10 months ago. Unfortunately I have ordered a number of things from their website which were shipped using prime shipping, I just assumed next day delivery was part of their service and not an extra that I had paid for. Because of this they are refusing to refund my membership. Do I have any grounds to take this further?
No You agreed to their terms even if you don't remember doing so or didn't understand what you were agreeing to. If this was a mistake it was your mistake: not Amazon's.
Assuming USA law: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2315 If you accept or buy goods that are knowingly stolen you may be fined or imprisoned. If you buy goods and later find out they were stolen you can sue for a refund. However, I'd say the likelihood of getting your money back is incredibly low.
Nobody know what constitutes "scamming", because it's not a legal concept. There is no sense in which receiving a gift itself constitutes "scamming". Since scamming is vaguely about dishonesty, there is an imaginable scenario where you could be liable for a false representation, for example if you impersonated someone else in order to receive something of value, you could be prosecuted in California. You should not assume that a police officer saying "That's not our problem" is proof that you committed no crime or civil tort. Your lawyer can give you advice as to whether you have anything to worry about, legally. The other stuff about being called a scammer or having pictures posted might be a violation of Facebook's TOS, and you can always complain to Facebook central authorities. Technically, uploading a picture that someone took is a violation of copyright law, if you didn't give permission to do so. It might run afoul of some state~provincial or national privacy law, depending on where this takes place.
An incomplete list: Getting the money. How did you plan to get paid? Credit card? Paypal? Integrating those into a website in compliance with their terms of service is not easy. (I wouldn't touch credit card numbers, in particular, even with a ten-foot pole. Too much liability risk for weak implementations. Too many highly skilled attackers to pounce on any mistake.) Distributing the App. Places like the Apple App Store have their own terms of service, especially regarding payment and in-app purchases. At a guess, Apple would reject your app, but if they allowed it, how does your withdrawal policy fit with the 30% cut they want from the initial transaction? Holding the money. So there are user accounts with a credit balance that can be withdrawn again. Would you be able to repay them if all users withdraw at the same time? Where do you keep the money? Currency risks. Say international customers pay in currency A, which the payment provider transforms into currency B. Then they want their money back, but exchange rates have changed. What do they get? Knowing your customer. There would be money laundering concerns. Do you have the infrastructure to identify your customers? Can customers change the (re)payment method from one account to another? Can you handle withdrawals if a user no longer has the same credit card, for instance? Scammers leaving you to hold the bag. Say a scammer tricks a victim into making a deposit, and then finds a way to redirect the withdrawal (see above). Would you be able to deal with the legal and administrative fallout?
By definition, a tip is at the discretion of the customer, so what you have is a service charge – a service charge is legal. It is legal to offer free delivery for orders over a stated amount, and to charge a percentage as delivery charge for lesser amounts. There is no specific law requiring a business to use the term &quot;service charge&quot; and no law forbidding them to separate the mandatory from the voluntary parts of the service charge / tip. However, if the amount charged is called a tip, it must go to the employee, whereas a &quot;service charge&quot; can go to the business. Therefore, it would be illegal to call it a tip but treat it as a service charge.
They are separate warranties. The store doesn’t have to do anything about the manufacturer’s warranty and vice versa. It is of course good service if the store takes care of things for you, but that isn’t legally required. I expect that you don’t need a receipt but proof of purchase. A bank statement or credit card statement should do. My bank (in the U.K.) can provide statements 10 years back online.
It is not a bait and switch, nor false advertising. It might be a violation of contract, depending on the exact wording of the TOS or other agreement with the site. Probably not. &quot;Bait and switch&quot; refers to the tactic of advertising a specific product at a good price to draw one into a store (or to a site) and then claiming to be out of the advertised item, and attempting to sell the buyer a different item, usually one that is not as good a bargain. Even then, this is only illegal in most places if the seller did not have enough stock to meet reasonably anticipated demand. A notice such as &quot;quantities limited&quot; or &quot;while supplies last&quot; generally makes this legal. If no attempt is made to &quot;switch&quot; the customer to a different product, there is also usually no illegality. Whether this is false advertising depends on exactly how it was advertised. If the TOS or ads contained wording such as &quot;no purchase is final until confirmed with airline&quot; then there is probably no false advertising, but the exact definition depends on the specifics of local law, and the details of the facts will matter a good bit.
No The contract is created at the moment that an offer was accepted. In normal circumstances: You accepted an offer that they made to the general public by sending a purchase order for specific items at specific prices, or They accepted your offer by communicating their acceptance to you (being advised that the goods have been dispatched counts). However, in this circumstance, the company has been explicit that the contract is only created when either: You checkout and pay, or They “supply an invoice to you.” It appears that neither event happened so there is no contract. Their specific terms have overridden the common law rules on offer and acceptance (as they are allowed to do) and the offer has not been accepted until you receive their invoice. Specifically, it cannot be accepted by performance (dispatching the goods) and the requirement for the invoice to be supplied overrides the postal rule. Note that, in this case, you got lucky. 99 times out of 100 there would have been a valid contract and you would have breached it. In future, cancel orders specifically, don’t make assumptions.