Let us say I am a bank. I have thousands of customers who use online banking for a variety of reasons. One day, as the CEO and decision maker for the company...I decide that to protect my users I must disable online banking as it is too easy for people to be keylogged and have their accounts hacked into.
So guess what, I am going to just pull the plug.
Oops. I just lost a large amount of business because my customers relied on online banking, and had no notice to prepare for the change.
If you're going to be hypothetical, at least actually come up with a situation that isn't massively different in a way that was clearly chosen to favor your argument...
How about you try a logical analogy, instead of an intentionally incorrect one?
Let us say you are a store. You have thousands of customers who order online with all the gift cards they got given for birthdays. One day, you discover that UPS is stealing large numbers of the packages you ship out, so you drop them as a carrier.
Gee, you look like a lot less of a jerk in the hypothetical when your decision was based on someone else's action...
If I was losing money in the process of shipping these packages, then I would understand dropping them as a carrier. If it was the customers entire responsibility, and they had to deal with UPS themselves, then I would do the correct thing and provide a notice ahead of time before removing the option to ship via UPS.
Is Tradehill losing money by allowing withdrawals via Dwolla? No.
May I lose money by using Dwolla, if these claims turn out to be true and Dwolla is a scam? Yes.
Is it my responsibility if I lose money in my Dwolla account? Yes.
Is it Tradehill's responsibility? No. They send the money, then at that point it is on me. So fine, they can act like the "good guys" and stop the withdrawals. At least give me some notice.
They took action to plug a fraud hole that had already cost them tens of thousands of dollars. They also promised to spend their own money to make sure that their customers won't directly lose any of that money. As a result, some people are temporarily inconvenienced. Get over it.
It isn't a "temporary inconvenience" when you are dealing with people's money. It is a major inconvenience, and a bad business practice.
Also, is Joel an official Tradehill employee? If this wasn't speculation regarding the negative balance, why does a non-employee have insider information regarding their situation with Dwolla?
It's not that difficult to come up with that on your own.
You need to realize that what TradeHill did was for your benefit, not theirs.
Let us say I am a bank. I have thousands of customers who use online banking for a variety of reasons. One day, as the CEO and decision maker for the company...I decide that to protect my users I must disable online banking as it is too easy for people to be keylogged and have their accounts hacked into.
So guess what, I am going to just pull the plug.
Oops. I just lost a large amount of business because my customers relied on online banking, and had no notice to prepare for the change.
TradeHill removed one of their many withdrawal methods, they didn't, as you say, "just pull the plug"
So if as a bank I decide one day without notice to not allow ATM deposits/withdrawals and online banking transactions to move money in and out of a bank account, but still allow teller transactions (hey, it is still a deposit/withdrawal method...) it makes it okay?
