Are there any country with laws allowing insurance buyers to cancel their insurance within 14 days? In Indonesia, there is a rule. If you buy an insurance, after you send the money, you will get some info. Some info are written more clearly after you buy the insurance. If you don't like it, you can return it. In practice, this is used for scamming customers. Most customers read terms carefully before buying product. Most customers are not aware of the 14 days rule. An Agent, for example, can claim that all money are invested. The customer puts money and found out that there is acquisition fee whose price is 100 times normal insurance rate. The fee is not disclosed before the purchase, or if disclosed at all, in a very obfuscated way. The insurance companies is well aware of this issue. That is why they have insurance products that "cost" 100 times normal price. The 14 days rules are then, among other things, used to justify that the customer "consent" to the term. It's as if the state itself help propagating the scam. Without the 14 days rule, an insurance company must write the fee more clearly before the customer buy. Now it can choose not to bother writing it, or do it less clearly. The agent will simply not tell the customer about the 14 days rule, not tell about the unreasonable fee. The customer think he has done due diligent. Then a clearer explanation is done within the 14 days. Typical customer would think the deal is done and that there is nothing else to consider. Hence, typical customer would not know that he has to check anything after "buying". After all we are careful before buying, not after. I wonder if other countries have similar things.
In the United Kingdom there is a law that for any online purchase or other purchase away from the businesses own premises, including insurance policies, that you have a 14 day cooling off period to cancel without penalty. The applicable parts of the law are the Consumer Contracts Regulations and if there is any form of credit agreement involved the Consumer Credit Act. It is a point of the law that the purchaser must be clearly made aware of these provisions.
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.
This is neither unusual nor illegal, assuming that the buyback price is specified in the agreement. If your friend does not wish to take advantage of the "nice discount" he can decline the deal, and decide for himself whether he wishes to buy shares without restriction, at the market rate. (It would be interesting to know what happens if he sells his shares and then leaves the company. I am fairly sure the agreement will cover this, but requiring an ex-employee to buy shares and then give them to the company could be considered unconscionable. That might be worth asking a lawyer about).
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.
This practice is known as "rescission". It is legal under 45 CFR §147.128 in some circumstances. The regulation says (a) A group health plan, or a health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage, must not rescind coverage under the plan, or under the policy, certificate, or contract of insurance, with respect to an individual (including a group to which the individual belongs or family coverage in which the individual is included) once the individual is covered under the plan or coverage, unless the individual (or a person seeking coverage on behalf of the individual) performs an act, practice, or omission that constitutes fraud, or makes an intentional misrepresentation of material fact, as prohibited by the terms of the plan or coverage. The law also prohibits surprises: A group health plan, or a health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage, must provide at least 30 days advance written notice to each participant (in the individual market, primary subscriber) who would be affected before coverage may be rescinded under this paragraph (a)(1), regardless of, in the case of group coverage, whether the coverage is insured or self-insured, or whether the rescission applies to an entire group or only to an individual within the group. (The rules of this paragraph (a)(1) apply regardless of any contestability period that may otherwise apply.) Note that the regulation pertains to insurance plans, and not employers. The employer may in good faith believe that you are stuck with the medical bills, but their opinion does not matter as far as this regulation goes. However, the employer also does not have the right to "declare" on behalf of the insurance company that your wife was covered. If you assume that she had coverage because the employer (mistakenly) said you did, but there was actually no coverage, then that is between you and the employer, or possibly you and the doctor. A prior question is whether she was actually covered in that past period. The contract between the insurance company and the employer might hypothetically state that only employees are covered, and may have accidentally submitted enrollment information with mistaken information ("X is an employee"). Since there was no intentional misrepresentation (we assume), coverage cannot be rescinded. Also note that rescission is retroactive cancelling, not prospective cancelling ("henceforth, you are not covered").
No. This is not gambling. Your quoted and paraphrased definition is especially misleading, since the original definition given on uslegal.com explicitly excepts bona fide business transactions valid under the law of contracts, such as the purchase or sale at a future date of securities or commodities, contracts of indemnity or guaranty and life, health or accident insurance. You pay an extra fee for the privilege of being on a waitlist for selection to an upgrade. That fee and list does not guarantee getting the upgrade any more than the fee and ticket guarantees you will have that seat on board that flight on that day. You only receive the tangible benefit if there is sufficient space and you satisfy the criteria set out by the airline (terms and conditions as provided at booking, policies applied by the airline whether publicly known or not, etc.).
First of all, this assumes that the debt consolidation firm would be willing to buy, and the CC company willing to sell. With a trial already scheduled, this might well not be the case. Secondly, when (if) the debt consolidation firm buys the debt, they buy the rights of the seller. In many states the trial could go forward, with the debt consolidation firm substituted as plaintiff. It is not automatic that a sale of the debt would postpone the legal case. Certainly if this happened once, it seems very unlikely that a second debt consolidation firm would buy the debt from the first. And as the comments by Moo and ohwilleke suggest, such a scheme would be fraudulent and criminal, if discovered. It might also constitute contempt of court for intentionally abusing the process of the court. Not a good or safe idea.
Is there a legal reason why many advertisements say “Limited Time Offer”? Sometimes, especially where the advertisement specifies the deadline. This would help defeating a claim of unfair and misleading practices that customers might pursue apropos of an open-ended offer. An offer triggers the offeree's power of acceptance. Lapse of time --whether reasonable or specified by the offeror-- and revocation by the offeror are two permissible methods for termination of that power. See Restatement (Second) of Contracts at §§ 36, 41. By specifying a deadline, the offeror preempts both the question of fact as to what constitutes reasonable time under the circumstances, Id. at 41(2), and an argument that revocation of the offer was so arbitrary that it took customers by surprise. Is there a law that says they have to include that? No. The decision mostly depends on the offeror's marketing preferences and the litigation risks associated to making an open-ended offer.