Read the Fine Print
As readers of this website will know, arbitration provisions are often located in boilerplate, found in take-it-or-leave-it contracts, raising procedural unconscionability issues in California. Our next case does not involve arbitration – though it does involve arbitration’s beloved mate, boilerplate.
So what happens when a bank fails to read doctored boilerplate?
Cory Doctorow posts on BoingBoing about a “wily Russian fellow” who “crossed out the fine-print on an unsolicited credit-card application . . . and wrote in his own terms, giving himself unlimited, interest-free credit and exemption from all fees, with a 3MM ruble fee [$91,000] should the bank change the terms and a 1MM ruble fee should they cancel his card.” He even crossed out the URL giving the terms and conditions, and wrote in his own URL !
Tinkoff Credit Systems, which provided the wily Russian with an unsolicited credit-card application, sued the customer. “However, the court held that his amendments were binding since the bank accepted them, whether it looked at them or not.”
We can only guess that, if Tinkoff Credit Systems, Russia’s largest on-line bank, had sued in California, it would have had an uphill battle arguing it was the feckless victim of procedural unconscionability.
On August 14, 2013, RT [previously Russia Today] reported that both parties had agreed to call off legal action:
“The conflict is unconstructive, this is why we decided to resolve it in a gentlemanly way, by lifting the mutual claims,” Tinkoff Credit Systems cites its President Oliver Hughes as saying.
“In 2008 it was just a joke, when I tailored my own form and produced that to the bank instead of the official form. But the joke has gone too far,” RIA Novosti cites the small print scribe Dmitry Agarkov as saying.
HAT TIP to attorney Colin Alexander, an avid reader of BoingBoing, who brought this story to my attention.
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