Dmitry Argarkov of Voronezh, Russia didn’t like the credit card offer that was sent to him by a Russian bank, Tinkoff. So he creatively took the contract, altered the language in his favor, signed it and sent it back to the bank. Some of the terms he amended were no interest rate, no credit limit, no obligation to pay the bank back and no fees. He included a fine in the contract language if they broke his amended terms of 3 million rubles and if they tried to cancel it they would have to pay 6 million rubles. He signed it and sent it in to the bank.
The bank didn’t realize that he had amended the terms and sent him a credit card which he started using immediately. After non payment for charges, they tried to cancel his card when Dmitry took them to court for breach of contract.
Surprisingly, a court ruled in Dmitry’s favor saying that the bank had legally entered into a contract with him and had broken the rules. The decision is now being appealed in a higher court. You can follow Tinkoff bank on twitter at @tcsbank for all new regarding the case (in Russian).
Wow, I think I saw this news like a month or two ago. a little bit for the party. Haha
@Nic – yeah, I’m certainly not in the breaking news business. 🙂
Karma. Banks have been changing terms and using fine print terms for generations to bilk customers and change the scenario to favor themselves. When a customer doesn’t read the fine print and is surprised later to discover terms not to his or her liking, that doesn’t preclude the terms being legally binding in any way.
Now the banks have had the scenario turned on them. KUDOS to the Russian gentleman for being so clever. If customers are responsible for reading the fine print the banks send us, then so too are the banks responsible for doing the same thing.