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I wrote for Singal-Minded (non-paywalled) on the topic of PayPal suspending accounts for what appear to be politically motivated reasons. I describe my experience with PayPal suspending my own account a few years ago, and how I managed to get it back:
PayPal, like many other companies, have a mandatory arbitration clause in their user agreements that require you to "agree" to waive your right to sue them in court if you have a dispute. I took PayPal up on the offer to settle our shit via arbitration but we never got that far because they quickly caved. I was prompted to write about all this after I met Colin Wright and offered to help him deal with his own PayPal bullshit. From my perspective, he refused my help but nevertheless kept writing opeds about the issue and soliciting donations. I heavily insinuated that he was intentionally holding on to his victimhood status as a grifting strategy. Turns out, I was wrong.
As best as I can tell, virtually nobody thinks to try to address the issue of politically-motivated corporate censorship with the tools already available to them. Not even FIRE talked about arbitration dispute resolution. This leads me to think this a low-hanging fruit counter-attack that's just ripe for the taking.
Edit: I found out about another instance of someone taking a company to arbitration and winning. See also the hacker news thread, esp. thathndude's posts where they explain how hiring an attorney (even one that doesn't do anything) can result in absurdly higher settlements.
You can go to or threaten arbitration against PayPay because
You are a lawyer and you don't have to pay a lawyer to have a half a chance at winning and
Paypal is a financial company and can't be quite as brazen as companies which don't touch the users money
Both your explanations are reasonable. Still, it wouldn't hurt if people tried to put up a fight more often with more companies. That would give us useful information.
I conceded that my legal background definitely gave me a strong edge here, but I think that was primarily in reducing the intimidation factor. Arbitration is intended to be a departure from the procedure labyrinth and inscrutable legalese that you find in traditional courtrooms. I would love to see how someone who isn't a legal professional wrangles with this process but I could not find any examples in my search.
My mom was involved in an landlord/renter arbitration proceeding. Not sure if you only care about paypal arbitration. The outcome was very frustrating, maybe because as someone without much experience with the legal system what we thought was a clear win turned out to be a total loss.
She had a lease with an apartment. As part of the enticement to get her to move in they offered the garage attached to the apartment as a free part of the lease. Everything is fine. Lease renewal comes up. Instead of sending her a lease with the attached garage as a paid addition, they resend her the original lease that had the garage as a free add on. She thinks 'awesome' proceeds to sign the lease and not pay for the garage. If they had asked her to pay for the garage up front, she would have chosen to just not have the garage.
Anyways another year is up and they haven't received payment for the garage. They ask her to pay, she refuses cuz it wasn't in the lease. It goes to arbitration. My mom loses she is ordered to pay.
In my mind the landlord fucked up and sent the wrong contract. The judge says 'hey they sent the wrong contract, but you (to my mom) probably understood which contract they meant to send, so pay the correct contract'. Which I guess is fair. But I never got the sense that it would happen in reverse. Like if the landlord sent the 'pay for the garage' contract the first year instead of the 'garage is free' and then realized their mistakes, they could have taken my mom to court and still won. And the judge would have said something like 'hey you (to my mom) should really be careful about reading contracts, you signed it and you agreed to pay even if it wasn't made clear to you in the initial verbal agreement'. The reason I got this sense, is that just about every case before my mom's was also decided in favor of the landlord.
I don't get the sense that arbitration is 100% going to be in favor of the company. But I do get the sense that it is going to be about 90% in favor of the company. And going through a bunch of effort for that slim 10% chance of victory doesn't seem worth it.
Thanks for sharing this, that sounds like an obviously frustrating outcome. Knowing very little about rental disputes, I also thought about the "meeting-of-the-minds" problem Syo brought up being an issue. I guess the strongest argument against your mom is that she must've known it was a mistake since the garage was part of an enticement deal. I'd be interested to know how arbitration outcomes compare to real courts for this issue, judges there aren't particularly known to be deferential to tenants.
She did know it was a mistake, but thought they'd be forced to eat their own mistake cuz it was in the contract. I can't remember the exact details but I thought they tried to make her sign a revised contract with the paid garage option. She refused to sign it cuz she saw no benefit in doing so, and thought that them trying to get her to sign it meant they'd have to abide by the contract they actually gave her.
Sorry to say, but it's not clear your mom was in the clear. What you're describing is a classic palpable unilateral mistake, where the remedy a traditional court would likely impose is either modifying the contract to make it "make sense", or canceling it completely. In general, contract law does not treat kindly people who think they've potentially hoodwinked the other party. It's not obvious to me that this result was caused by arbitration.
Fair enough, but its not like a lay person knows that. And its not like lay people don't get exploited by this kind of bullshit all the time.
She had told them she didn't want to pay for the garage when the lease came up for renewal. They added it to the contract for free for the second year. Had it been appropriately written with her paying for the garage she wouldn't have signed that lease.
There was confusion for her about that contract, did they give the garage to her for free cuz she said she wouldn't pay for it, or did they screw up in giving her the free garage? Once they came back and said "you need to pay for this" her response was "I don't want to pay for it, I'd rather not have the garage, but its in the contract I signed". They then try to get her to sign a different contract, she doesn't. Then they go silent for 8 months and bring it to arbitration.
It wasn't like she was trying to hoodwink them. There was a garage she barely used and didn't want to pay for, she had a job working 80 hours a week, and wasn't going to spend the time to get up to spend on contract and leasing law. Going back in time she would have adamantly told them to take it off her lease.
In my mind they might have realized they were in the right at month 4 and allowed her to rack up the additional 8 months of payments cuz they knew they'd win in arbitration/court at the end of it.
Another story about apartments. I was moving out of an apartment. I emailed our landlord in May to say that we were moving out by August. Landlord doesn't respond. I respond to the email in June, "hey do you need anything from us? We are moving out by August." No response until a few days from the end of June "we need two months notice of your official move out date". I'm like yeah, that is why I sent you the email in May. They say "you didn't give us an official move out date. Without an official move out date you didn't give us notice." Grr me: "[whatever the last day of July] is our official move out date". Them "Ok that is only a month away, you still owe us rent for all of August".
I asked some for some legal advice on reddit and the two people that said they had dealt in rental law said I was basically guaranteed to lose. I took their advice and just paid for that month. But seriously, fuck them. They could have told me that I didn't say the exactly correct magic words to fulfill a contract. Instead they just went silent and let me rack up another month of rent. I felt a little better after I blasted them on google reviews for their shitty email communication.
In general I just don't think you realize how damn frustrating the legal system and arbitration systems are for anyone not officially a part of it. From the outside it just looks like a thinly veiled system for saying "fuck you, you lose! Now pay us money!" I have zero faith in the fundamental fairness of the legal system, or most arbitration systems. If paypal or some bank stole a bunch of money I had stored with them, I wouldn't expect to get it back via a court or arbitration system. I'd go to the most popular friends I have and try to take the issue to the court of public opinion, and hope that somewhere there had "this one weird trick" that might work to get my money back, or hope that it blows up and they are forced to give my money back due to public pressure. That is coming from someone who loathes Twitter mobs. Yet somehow they appear to offer a much better chance of justice.
This whole topics has gotten me very worked up. And I consider myself and my mother well educated people that are generally very capable of navigating the bureaucratic world we often live in. I can't imagine how shit the system is for people who don't have the same level of bureaucratic navigation skills we have.
This is a completely fair point but I don't think I articulated myself in the best way here. I am not even trying to defend the legal system here. You're completely right that a lay person would have no reason to know about things like "palpable unilateral mistake" contract law. I personally think what happened to your mom was unfair, so when I'm citing the legal standard on these disputes that shouldn't be taken as an endorsement.
The issue here isn't whether the legal system is fair, it's not! This is especially so when you take into account pervasive power imbalances. Anyone with clout, power, money, intelligence, sophistication, etc will be able to clobber anyone who doesn't have those to defend themselves. So when I bring up arbitration, it's not in isolation, it's relative. Is arbitration dispute resolution fair on its own? No! Is arbitration "fairer" than traditional courts? I don't know, maybe, maybe not!
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In some countries such a lease would be refered to as a "contract of adhesion". And in any case, the party that wrote contract, would be assumed to posses a more thorough knowledge of its content. Any article that can be read multiple ways, would be interpreted to the detriment of the contract-writer.
But on the other hand, on this specific point, a meeting-of-the-minds did not occur as your mother thought her lease included the garage, while the owner did not.
Had the owner alerted her that she needs to pay extra for garage, after a period of significantly shorter than a year, this dispute wouldn't have gotten this far.
It's not a contract of adhesion, as it was negotiable.
Yes, those are the standard rules. The lower-level adjudicators that ordinary people get to deal with don't follow those kinds of rules. They just kind of decide which party they favor and rule for them. And it's not the individual who they see once who they favor. (Except in jurisdictions which have flipped entirely the opposite way and decided the landlord is always wrong)
The contract terms were plain and (as you mention) written by the party disputing their plain meeting. That's enough to establish the meeting of the minds. Changing their minds a few months later shouldn't really cut it.
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The owner alerted her after a few months, at which point she pointed out that the contract didn't include the garage. And that she doesn't want the garage if she has to pay for it. They went silent and then asked her to pay again at the end of the lease. She said no and they went to arbitration.
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This situation is exactly what the "Statute of Frauds" is for. For real estate contracts, usually including leases, what's on paper is supposed to be what counts. One problem with doing it otherwise and trying to read the minds of the parties is it's very easy for the judge to apply the "you should have known" rule or the "this is what's on paper" rule depending on which party it favors.
I think @ymeskhout's original article said 94-99% in favor of the company.
I really don't get the outcome of her case, it frustrated me that they could just throw out the contract as written in favor of the person that wrote the contract. At that point why even bother having my mom sign a contract? They treated it more like a "terms of use" agreement. Like unless you move out you agree to whatever the company wants within some "reasonable" restrictions of what the company can ask for.
Have you not been to court? The laws on paper really don't matter until you're at a fairly high level (and have a lawyer). At the low levels, everyone in the system knows what's supposed to be and will brook no argument. The defendant is always guilty; the corporation is always right.
I've luckily not been in court very much, but that incident has certainly brought me that level of cynicism about things.
The annoying thing about this incident is that the cost of hiring a lawyer was probably going to be most of the cost of paying for the garage.
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You're right about the intent behind "statute of frauds" although minor quibble is that it only applies to rental agreements longer than a year. But even where SoF does not apply by default, any contract can include something similar through an "integration clause" that says nothing outside the four corners of this written agreement counts (e.g. oral modification, or some other verbal promise).
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