Sounds like a lawsuit in the making if the harm is great enough.

Lawsuits only really work if you know who to sue. And if they live in a country that will honor your country's court's decisions. And if they have money.

What laws would be broken in this case?

Tortious interference, also known as intentional interference with contractual relations, in the common law of torts, occurs when one person intentionally damages someone else's contractual or business relationships with a third party causing economic harm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference

Yes, but you need to serve notice to the offending party, which might be hard if they are not a US person...

likewise collecting damages, etc

There might be something subtly illegal here - but I assume Apple would just refuse to honor the refund if they thought it was fraudulent - so it wouldn't be up to Apple to collect damages - it'd be up to the other party to collect their refund (assuming they can legally compel Apple to pay up)

How does that apply? In hypothetical this thread has been discussing nobody is damaging the contractual relationship itself nor is anybody preventing either company from fulfilling their contractual obligations. In fact, it's the strength and continued operation of the contractual relationship that would cause the economic harm. I don't think tortious interference applies here.

I would guess that buying an app with the intention of harming the app creator by doing a refund is against the ToS, and I think that's fair (since the purpose of the refund mechanism is to allow the buyer to change their mind for some "good faith" reason - even something like a change of mood is fine, but "to harm the creator" is obviously not)

Good luck proving that intention in court!

I've heard of this but am curious, does this also apply to people calling for boycotting companies?

> Tortious interference, also known as intentional interference with contractual relations

I think it would depend on the local jurisdiction's definition of the tort. A purchase/refund scheme would not induce Apple or the vendor to breach their app store contract, but it would deprive the vendor of its expected economic benefit.

Ianal but it might go under tortious interference?

No, I don't believe it would apply. Tortious interference is when you interfere with the contractual relationship itself. In this case the continued obligations is what would drive the economic harm, thus tortious interference wouldn't apply.

I was thinking more along the lines of criminal laws, I should have been more specific in my word choice.

The word "lawsuit", at least in American english, has the connotation of a civil rather than a criminal case.

Something about conspiracy to defraud, maybe?

How is that fraud? "Everyone, buy this product and return it to the store for a full refund," doesn't sound like fraud to me. It doesn't result in personal or financial gain to the people perpetrating it, either.

edit: so who is in trouble here? The person calling for people to do it with their twitter following or the twitter followers? I'm not saying that buying the app and returning it is not fraud if you entered into the transaction in bad faith and with intent to cause damage to the dev, I'm saying calling people to do that is not fraud.

You would be fraudulently filling out the request form - unless Apple has a "Reason for refund: For the Lulz" in its drop down box. You would also probably committing some sort of credit card fraud by enacting a transaction in bad faith.

I think the form is definitely fraud but I wouldn't be surprised if Visa went after you for something as well, they need to actually process all those charges and charge backs and it does cost them some amount of money to do so.

If I say the product wasn't useful to me, that's going to be completely true.

You are entering into a purchase agreement without the intention to actually purchase the item - that is most definitely fraud. It's like ordering a brand new car without the intention to actually ever pick it up, but instead to cost the dealer money. If you're acting maliciously that's definitely fraud.

I completely agree and understand. My statements were about the person inciting others to commit the fraud without so many words. Basically, I was saying it is not fraud to tell your twitter followers to buy and return an item. It may be conspiracy though.

Then you’d be a jerk. There are many, many ways to be a jerk in life.

So all it takes is a jerk then..

Good thing there are so few of those. /sarcasm

It's rather stunning how you took that rhetorical question literally, and in the process missed the point spectacularly.

Perhaps you missed my point. I'm simply suggesting that the answer to this rhetorical question is yes, you could do that, but you'd be a jerk for having done so. Having an internet army do jerk-like things for you occurs all too frequently.

> It's rather stunning how you took that rhetorical question literally, and in the process missed the point spectacularly.

In the past 2 weeks you've said quite a lot of mean things to people on HN. Please stop doing that.

You're right, my bad.

Or have a botnet do it

Individual bots in a botnet usually don't have their own credit cards.

You can buy stolen credit card data on the same sites where you can buy botnet access.