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There was a story floating around recently about a Russian man who marked up his credit card agreement and sent it back, where it was blindly signed by a representative of the card company, and he then enforced it on them with hilarious and expensive consequences for the card company. Yeah, they'll probably just toss your counter-offer. But the point is that you can make it. You can take their contract, alter it, sign the altered copy, and send it back, and then they can accept or refuse. The important point here is that you are not considered to have agreed to the original because you signed an altered copy. A more thorough way to do this electronically would be to modify the DOM, save the modified agreement, click Agree to sign your end, and then e-mail the modified agreement back to the originator and let them know what's going on. Of course, their automated systems have given you access in the meantime, but that's hardly your fault. I don't really understand how making a modification you know won't be sent back to the server is "fraud", but sending the user an agreement you know won't be read is "not fraud". Seems like either we base both scenarios on what people should do (read the original/modified agreement), or on what people actually do (not read anything), but not base one scenario on one and one scenario on the other. You say you don't see why an agreement to the original is invalidated because you couldn't make a counter-offer, but that's how contracts work. Negotiation is inherent to the process. Big companies are trying to hide that with form contracts that everyone is expected to sign as-is, but it's still supposed to be present. |