Yet I think I have a stigma claiming illness or disability... don't know. So, next time I'm going to try this:
I am a foreigner and have serious issues understanding
spoken English. Please avoid calling me and let us try to
resolve the issue over email.Wow, that's interesting. They can't even require a doctor's certification of some sort (without any details)? How does that work for companies that give discounts (say) to the disabled? Can everybody lie to get them legally then? This doesn't sound right. (Note that it doesn't have to necessarily be the ADA outlawing this, so I wouldn't just rely on that.)
> Second, you don't have to be explicitly diagnosed as having a disability to have one.
Do you mean to have one medically or legally? The former is obvious to me but the latter isn't.
That's correct, generally. I mean, if you show up at an airport with an oxygen take, be prepared to demonstrate that you medically require it. It's also different for employment, where your boss may ask you to provide evidence that you need a special accommodation to do your job.
The ADA has exemptions for when it would be unsafe or unreasonable to provide accommodation, and those are the only places where anyone can discriminate against someone for whatever their condition might be (eg the vision and prescription requirements for pilots). In fact the ADA explicitly disallows asking for any general information about disabilities - an employer can only ask yes/no questions about specific criteria.
I can’t imagine what their argument for not supporting someone cancelling their subscription would be.
Fun question: if you were to say you were cancelling for medical reasons would they be opening themselves up to a lawsuit if the call center asked what it was?
That changes when talking to some LEOs, doctors about certain things in some places, swearing to facts in official contexts and that sort of thing.
But generally speaking, I can lie to you all day long about anything I want. Which is as it has to be, at least if we want to navigate daily life without a full-time lawyer as a companion.
[1] And there's blackmail, which is a weird one - we know it is "wrong", but it is hard to formulate a legal theory as to why, because a perfectly legal act (disclosing embarrassing info about someone, for instance) becomes illegal only after a coercive warning giving the victim a chance to stop it.
I agree, but at the same time you probably wouldn't be interested in saying most of these lies, so it's difficult to use that as a basis for assuming the legality of the ones we might be interested in.
> Most of them involve violence of some sort or deceiving you about something you're giving me money for[1].
This is where I'm stuck. Fraud seems to have a wider scope than money (the obvious counterexample being if you're giving someone something other money, it can still result in fraud). What I'm unclear on is how wide the scope gets. Does "something" have to be tangible and does it have to have a clear monetary value in damages? I don't know what the answer is (which is why I asked), and it seems to me that it could go either way.
IANAL, to be clear. But yes, fraud is generally defined legally as deception for "gain", which is usually, but not always, denominated in money.
Beyond that, like everything else in law, it gets complicated. Are you asking about civil or criminal fraud? Where?
Also, even if you have a case that is technically civil fraud (say, I tricked you out of a dollar) or criminal fraud (I overstated my income on a mortgage application by a dollar), for small-dollar amounts you'll find you have a lot of difficulty actually bringing a case/no DA will touch it, simply because it is too small to waste court time on.
Incidentally, that final point is why ATT and Comcast want to kill class actions. If the people they cheat can't band together, it is too much trouble for anyone to recover that $2.74 "Up Yours Because We Can ILEC Infrastructure Recovery Fee".
IANAL.
You basically described the whole field of advertising, if you make misrepresenting facts illegals, there's not a lot of businesses that would not be fined.
It's not like a parking space where if I park in it, then it's unavailable for a handicapped person. There's someone's job to handle these requests and they have a limitless capacity. If anything, it actually takes less company man hours to respond to an asynchronous email request than a synchronous phone request.
I agree that it does feel a slight bit scummy, but after thinking about it I decided that I was OK with it. I can see how some others might think differently though.