[asciident]

I was actually thinking about ethics a lot while I was doing this little project. By ethics do you mean morals or something different? What framework would you suggest for determining the ethics/morals of doing something like this, where we're playing by the legal rules by trying to optimize for our own benefit?

[jsf01]

Think about it like this. The logical conclusion of people acting like you did is that credit card issuers increase interest rates to make up for their losses. That makes life worse for everyone but the people exploiting the loophole. You’re no different from the people who exaggerate their losses to insurance companies in order to claim extra insurance money. Because of them, premiums have gone up. You might see yourself as some kind of Robinhood figure, but ultimately it’s going to be the other people participating in your network that suffer.

[asciident]

Thanks for the reply. There is a clear difference between claiming extra insurance money and what I'm doing: lying to get more insurance money is fraud, while what I'm doing is exactly what the service is intended for (sending money to others for free).

But using your framework of, "if everyone did this, how would this affect the business and others using the business," then I (and many others) are doing a lot of other unethical things. Ad blocking and card counting (in blackjack) clearly would be deemed unethical under this criteria, but here's a bunch of other more tangible examples.

There's a popular pastry place that has 50% off sales on Sunday afternoon because they are closing Monday so they sell the remaining stock at a significant discount before close. I only go there on Sunday afternoons, but if everyone did that, then the prices would go up for all.

Another thing I do is using the books, video games, movies, and streaming services offered by my library and never buy any real media. But if everyone did this, then bookstores, theaters, and streaming companies would go bankrupt.

[Gpetrium]

You may be following the letter of the law but not the spirit of the law.

The cashback was created as an incentive, you found a way to exploit the business model for personal gain in ways that can have an impact on others ability to enjoy the system while having a material impact on the provider of the service. Most in your position will say "but I am only a small piece of the cog" however, if a small minority starts to think the same way, it can have a real impact on a variety of things, including trust between parties.

Everyone tries to rationalize their actions, whether it is or becomes socially acceptable is another matter.

[scarface74]

Well, everyone that takes a VC subsidized ride on Uber is also having a negative impact on their business. If the business makes rules that are unsustainable for their business, it’s their fault. They could very easily set limits to curb abuse.

[IanCal]

Uber are obviously trying to get people to use their service. If using their service is bad for them, that's their fault because they were deliberately trying to encourage a behaviour that was detrimental to their business.

That is different from finding a way through the rules which is clearly unintended.

[FPGAhacker]

You don't think offering cash back is a way to get people to use their service?

[Starknaked]

It's not the user's responsibilty to ensure these incentives are sustainable. Look at what happened with the Hoover free flight program.

[IanCal]

The user is the one, well, using it! Sure, in some cases it's not obvious if you're abusing the system but this seems pretty clear.

[Starknaked]

The best way I've seen businesses get around this issue is to just have an upper limit on the incentive like interest applies only to the first $x. Its often a nice bonus for people that were going to use them anyway but not enough for people to justify exploiting the incentive alone.

[IanCal]

> while what I'm doing is exactly what the service is intended for

The service was intended to pay you significant sums to move money back and forth?

[Not_anchovie]

Interesting discussion. Certainly, some of this fails simply by not agreeing upon what is ethical. For instance, people can claim that blocking ads is an unethical action, but if the ads themselves are attempting illegal things (and some are), then blocking ads has a quite legitimate and useful purpose.

[scarface74]

I’m going to preface what I’m about to write by saying yes I understand life happens and I’ve carried a balance on a credit card charging high interest at one point in my life.

- If you have a credit card with decent cash back/rewards program. The interest rate is going to be higher. If you are carrying a balance month to month. You’re doing it wrong.

- If life happens and you do end up with a balance and your credit is decent, you should be able to get a no interest for x months, no interest balance transfer.

Credit Cards aren’t a life necessity. Homeowners insurance and car insurance are. Taking advantage of the rules as they exist is not unethical. Insurance fraud is both unethical and illegal.

[TimTheTinker]

> The logical conclusion of people acting like you did is that credit card issuers increase interest rates to make up for their losses.

Actually no, they pay for it directly out of transaction fees levied on sellers (which are usually around 3-5%). Some of that they take for themselves, and some they use for consumer rewards. It's a great way to make a lot of money and keep consumers incentivized to use them.

Economically, it's sort of like crappy product/service things licensed to prisons (like video telephones) that charge hefty fees to the inmates and their families, and give a significant portion of those fees back to the prisons. They're taking advantage of the incentives they can provide to the decision makers (prison administrators, or consumers in the case of credit cards) to overcharge the other party (inmates, or vendors), and make a lot of money in the process.

[lazyasciiart]

It's very different - one of those people is lying.

[chrischen]

Your scenario only happens if the credit card company is incompetent. But then the bad guy is the incompetence really...

[anon4748393]

Be careful with stuff like this. Credit card contracts typically require a fee for anything that amounts to a cash withdrawal instead of a purchase. Depending on the exact construction, it might be fraudulent to knowingly breach the contract to bleed the bank. If it’s not worth talking to a lawyer about it, it’s probably not worth doing.

[IanCal]

A simple overall rule here is to consider what the intended behaviour was from the company offering this. Anything that fits the rules, but is outside what you would consider expected behaviour is essentially exploiting a bug.

A similar thing happens when someone offers "unlimited storage" for home broadband users backups and people start hosting many many terabytes of porn / isos / whatever. Sure, they're entirely within the allowed behaviour, but it's clearly intended to make it easy for people to backup their photos and documents without having to know if a gigabyte is enough or not.

I would say I feel like using something in a way not intended (even if allowed) that is detrimental to the person/people offering it is unethical when considered in isolation.

I'm actually a little surprised this needs saying, is this not a common view?

edit - I guess not if it was downvoted so quickly (I know, I know, I'm not complaining about the internet points, it's honestly very interesting to me). Are people that on board wit h heavily abusing systems just because it's technically within the rules?

Remind me to never offer free pizza at a HN event as someone may turn up, say "you didn't specify a per person limit" and walk off with the food intended for everyone.

[holidaygoose]

I don't subscribe to your view at all, but I think this is an interesting discussion. If I understand you correctly, you're saying that users/customers should be trying to guess what the intention of the company is, and doing things not aligned with those goals is unethical?

My local gym and Moviepass (remember them?) expects people to sign up and rarely use the gym or watch movies. Otherwise, they would go out of business if everyone actually constantly used them. Is my using the gym or watching movies every day unethical? It sounds like you're calling lot of people unethical. Aren't people heavily abusing Moviepass by actually watching movies nearly every day?

In a more hypothetical scenario, let's say Facebook does not want people to use its platform to organize political/activism activities, because it makes the company look bad. It does not prohibit it, but let's say the CEO says on a talkshow that he wants people to use Facebook only for positive things. Would that make organizing on Facebook unethical?

It just seems like your view doesn't match how most of society views their social contract with for-profit companies.

[IanCal]

> If I understand you correctly, you're saying that users/customers should be trying to guess what the intention of the company is, and doing things not aligned with those goals is unethical?

No, that's missing the key part that it has to be detrimental to the person offering it.

> Is my using the gym or watching movies every day unethical?

I don't think so, if you're using the service because you want to go to the gym every day or see all the films. The website for moviepass says "see it all" so it seems reasonable to go and see every film. Finding a 24 hour cinema and living in it because now you don't have to pay rent - seems unethical to me.

Imagine if moviepass said "see a film every week" but technically didn't say you couldn't see many every day. The underlying rules are technically the same - if you knew they had to pay most of the cost of a ticket, would you feel like the ethics of going every day would be different?

I said it was a simple rule, as there will be edge cases for everything and wider contexts (blocking a road as an act in isolation seems bad, but what if it's a protest, etc). There are though obvious answers to me, and getting eighteen grand a year for rapidly moving money back and forth is one that has an easy answer.

> In a more hypothetical scenario, let's say Facebook does not want people to use its platform to organize political/activism activities, because it makes the company look bad. It does not prohibit it, but let's say the CEO says on a talkshow that he wants people to use Facebook only for positive things. Would that make organizing on Facebook unethical?

Comes down to level of harm, just like anything else. Remove the brand Facebook from that as it's a vast empire. What if it were a small local service for residents to catch up, and political fighting would mean they'd have to shut down?

> It just seems like your view doesn't match how most of society views their social contract with for-profit companies

Is it ethical to go to an all you can eat restaurant and if there's no explicit sign stopping you then packing up all the food in huge bags and walking out?

If there's a sample table that says "free cakes" would you take all of them?

[holidaygoose]

If you remove the editorializing, I don't see a bit of difference between "moviepass says you can see all the films (but if everyone did they would go broke, and they did go broke, leading to loss of service for everyone)" and "financial company says you can send money for free (and if everyone did they would lose money)" which is what the op did.

On a more meta level, I am concerned about an ethical view where different ethical rules apply if different actors are involved. It leads to one person basically not liking something (drugs, activism, etc.) and calling it unethical because of some broad claims about harm to society.

[IanCal]

> If you remove the editorializing, I don't see a bit of difference between "moviepass says you can see all the films (but if everyone did they would go broke, and they did go broke, leading to loss of service for everyone)" and "financial company says you can send money for free (and if everyone did they would lose money)" which is what the op did.

The financial company didn't run a website saying "want to be paid thousands? Move money back and forth repeatedly with our services!".

> On a more meta level, I am concerned about an ethical view where different ethical rules apply if different actors are involved.

Different actors are different so I don't see why that's a concern. Different intent is also surely not an odd addition here? It's foundational in so many legal systems even.

[kuzimoto]

I think it would be better to assume that any service you offer could be exploited, than to think otherwise. Lots of places run deals and sales on items with the condition "limit x per person per day" for that exact reason. Or an "unlimited" high-speed phone plan might have a restriction in the fine print where you're throttled after some amount.

Also "expected behavior" seems like it could be pretty subjective. Different cultures have wildly different values.

[IanCal]

It's perfectly fine to assume something will be exploited and call the exploitation unethical.

> Also "expected behavior" seems like it could be pretty subjective. Different cultures have wildly different values.

Sure, and it's down to your expectations. Two people can perform the same act with different intentions, and only one may be unethical.