I certainly sympathize with your situation, and don't begrudge you your concerns against e-gold and against CashCards.net. However, I don't think obtaining a court order is entirely a trivial matter.
It is certainly dangerous that e-gold.com has continued to host its servers in the USA. The USA is a very extremely litigious environment. Also, it is now full of Nazi prosecutors pursuing asinine laws which are among the worst invasions of privacy in world history. With offshore hosting cheap, plentiful, and effective, in jurisdictions with much less aggravation, I am baffled why e-gold.com seems to be stuck in the USA.
precedent with dangerous implications for all of us.
With regard to the dangerous implications, one of the groups which has been set up to address these matters is the Global Digital Currencies Association, http://www.gdcaonline.org/ or "GDCA." One of the goals of the GDCA is to offer dispute resolution services which avoid the cost and complexity of court orders and let people of good will work together to get results without resulting to the force and fraud of state mechanisms.
It now appears to me that we also need to set up a private address book so that people who need to be in touch with other members in good standing can do so without anyone losing privacy. E-mail address @gdcaonline.org could auto-forward to private e-mail, and be a way of quickly contacting the owner of a given account. (For example, those willing would enter their account number and preferred e-mail address into the GDCA database. Then anyone e-mailing [EMAIL PROTECTED] would have a message auto-forwarded to the appropriate account holder.
Apparently my account was frozen by court order. Yesterday I found my account unaccessible.
It is in fact a good thing that the court order mechanism is taken seriously by e-gold.com. If it were not, then the e-gold servers would be raided by court order and seized. That would not be any good for any of us.
From an email which was still in my trash bin I learned the following:
I have to say that if you didn't read the e-mail from CashCards.net until after you found you were unable to access your account, I'm not sure why you think Cash Cards didn't try to contact you to get your attention before grabbing for a court order.
Even so, I'm also completely baffled why CashCards has such poor procedures that they:
inadvertently put these funds into your E-Gold account (No. 102468).
Everyone who uses e-gold knows it is an irrevocable spend system. Why would CashCards be so willfully negligent as to spend any amount of e-gold, let alone thousands of dollars worth of e-gold, to an account where that gold didn't belong? Something is very wrong at CashCards if they have stumble-bums putting e-gold in random accounts. The cost in terms of court orders and lawyer fees serves them right for being so careless and irresponsible.
E-Gold has strict privacy rules and other restrictions,
CashCards.net's lawyer seems to be saying that strict privacy rules and procedures are a bad thing. Which is rather typical of attorneys in the USA. Again, the e-gold.com service would be better served, and the merchants and users would be better off, if e-gold were not served from within the USA. It is nutty that they would attempt to offer privacy rules and irrevocable spends in as great an anti-privacy and anti-freedom nation-state as the USA. What were you thinking, Doug Jackson?
E-Gold would not reverse the transaction
Right on, e-gold!
or freeze the account
Right on, e-gold!
unless Cash Cards obtained an order from a court.
Serves you right, CashCards. How come you were acting so foolishly as to put e-gold in the wrong account?
we want to work cooperatively with you to get Cash Cards' funds back and unfreeze the account as quickly as possible.
Did you guys at CashCards think about Danny in this process? You sent him some megabytes of .pdf file attachments. But, you have a court order. You can get a subpoena just as easily, so you can get all the account contact details. You can call him on the phone after a trivial process of discovery. You can send him a letter by Priority Mail. Did you make any good faith effort to contact him after getting your court order? It sure doesn't sound like it.
Sending attachments to someone who has never gotten e-mail from you before is a great way to have your message auto-filtered to trash. It is simply a stupid idea to send attachments when you are trying to send e-mail to someone new. Moreover, it is an irritant that people who don't have big bucks to spend on lawyers and therefore big bucks to spend on high speed connections find difficult to tolerate. Did your lawyer spend any time thinking about how long it takes to download his .pdf file attachments over a dial-up connection, Steve? Or did you just hire the first fool out of law school?
We apologize that we had to proceed in this fashion, but I hope you can understand and appreciate E-Gold's rules.
What a lousy apology. "E-gold made us do it." Nonsense. It sure doesn't seem like either CashCards.net or e-gold.com made any sort of good faith effort to contact Danny before this situation required attorneys and courts. And the idea that the apology is necessitated only by e-gold's rules is a complete crock.
Steve Renner: You should apologize to Danny publicly because your people put e-gold into his account without his permission, because your people failed to contact him, and because your people filed a court order without prior contact with him. You should also apologize for your idiot lawyer sending huge .pdf files.
Since you guys have frozen his account, you might at least do him the favor of printing out the relevant portion of his account history or your account's history, so he has some reason to believe you've put e-gold into his account before effectively hijacking it from him.
After that, I will dismiss the lawsuit.
Who is this lawyer Shiff?
Sean Shiff has no power to dismiss the lawsuit. He can move for dismissal, but he's involved the state. The court doesn't have to approve his motion for dismissal. Sean Shiff ought to know better than to claim that he will dismiss the lawsuit, unless he's the judge. (And if he's the judge, all kinds of conflict of interest discussion arises.)
If you have any questions for E-Gold
What about questions for CashCards.net? Why isn't Sean Shiff giving out an 800 number for CashCards?
This could be a well constructed scam
Oh, joy. Just what we need. Scammers armed with lawyers getting court orders to steal e-gold. Great stuff. Again, it is certainly a stupid choice on e-gold.com's part to be hosted within the USA. I cannot understand this choice, though it may be that they are now so thoroughly used by the federal agencies that if they were to move offshore, they'd have all kinds of new problems from the feds. Which makes James Turk's choice of starting his hosting offshore seem quite clever by comparison.
Anyone who is running an online currency service from servers within the USA is making a big mistake.
But I guess e-gold would not have frozen the account if the claim was not true..
Sadly, no. E-gold obeys court orders. The merits of the truth of the court order is not up to e-gold.
In theory, you were supposed to have been served papers, Danny, by the court in a criminal case or by CashCards.net in a civil case. But, obviously, the business of discovering your mailing address and shipping papers to you has been either too much trouble for CashCards, or you've given no working address to e-gold.com, or both.
I want some proof however.
Indeed.
Basically this means that anybody can proceed easily to have an account frozen by court order.
It isn't that easy, Danny. It is easy enough that it can be a pain in the neck, but it isn't trivial.
All you need to do is put some money into the victim's account by 'mistake' and head to Minesota court.
Actually, any "relevant jurisdiction" with full reciprocity would be enough. That means at least any court in the USA.
They will order to have your private data transmitted to the court.
Sure, discovery. In theory, they are supposed to offer you service - serve you papers that tell you what is going on so you can contest the court's orders.
The order also forces e-gold to hand over all information about transactions done from the account since the mistaken funds came in.
E-gold obeys court orders, but it would not have to do so if it were in a different jurisdiction. If its servers were offshore, it could proceed to contest the reasonableness of court orders from the USA. Too bad, huh?
They've already gone to some trouble to put the gold offshore. Why not the servers? Silly.
Moreover your name is mentioned in a court case, so people who look up your records later on will find out that an account of yours has been frozen by court order, so they will easily assume you have been engaged in criminal activity, money laundering,
You can be sure that people would assume anything about anyone without evidence, so why moan about them assuming things with limited evidence? You can contest the claims made. But, you also have the choice of using e-gold's service. Maybe you'd like to switch to e-Bullion, where other policies prevail. Or GoldMoney, which is very much more offshore. Or even 1MDC if you want to stick with all the advantages of e-gold, but not have their servers know about your transactions.
If the victim happens to live in a country where it is not completely legal to have accounts abroad, he could be in for even more trouble.
No question, living in the USA is a hassle. It is not a choice to be taken without advice and consideration. It seems like much of Euro-world is also getting stupid with bad laws.
A lot of damage and trouble while you actually did NOTHING.
Well, it seems to me that Sean Shiff has done a lousy job of apologizing for CashCards.net's mistakes.
I also have not yet received any message directly from e-gold about this matter.
You were given an 800 number to call e-gold for free and talk to them about it. You may wish to avail yourself of that option, Danny.
The proposal you are making is not realistic because it doesn't take into account all the damage that I am suffering because of your client's mistake.
Quite true. I'd say the damage you have suffered by not being able to access your account and your gold is worth at least $3,260. Maybe you should fight them. Of course, fighting in court in Minnesota is going to be expensive for you. So you should impose attorney fees and court costs in your counter-suit. This could get ugly.
Which is another reason why the GDCA is needed.
Sending faxes from Belgium and Bulgaria
You are in Belgium and Bulgaria at the same time? Wow. You must be tall, or something. <smile>
I suppose it is a certain amount of gold grams
Yes, I think Mr. Renner may be able to accept the weight of gold issue. It is actually ounces of gold that are used in the e-gold.com sytem, not grams. The precise weights are given in ounces troy of gold, so you'd do best to offer to return the precise amount of gold by weight, less your damages and costs, of course.
that was put into my account by mistake.
You'd think that CashCards.net would be willing to admit its error and write off the sunk cost rather than go through all these difficulties. What a mess.
The value of these goldgrams will fluctuate with the pog.
You may wish to capitalize abbreviations and acronyms like POG = Price of Gold if you wish for comprehension, especially where lawyers have become involved.
The court order will have to be changed and show the amount in gold grams, not $
Should be in ounces troy, as the underlying unit of account in the e-gold system.
account is ordered frozen without any questions asked.
Makes you want to rush over to Cambist.net and swap your e-gold for something safer, like 1MDC grams or e-Bullion. http://cambist.net/
Now I see some better turing numbers there,
Good for you! Maybe if we all were to move our e-gold out of e-gold's system, they would be persuaded to come to their senses and put their servers offshore.
Wayne Dawson asks:
Why didn't they just ask you for the money back before resorting to a court order?
Steve? Any defense?
Frank Mottley says:
CashCards clearly made no good-faith gesture to attempt to recover these funds,
That seems doubtful, Frank. I mean, Danny sez the e-mail he did get was auto-filtered to trash. So, we don't know that CashCards made no attempt to contact him. Nothing effective, certainly, but possibly not nothing.
Steve Renner, if you're reading, you can keep that free Cash Card you were going to send me. I am not interested in doing business with anyone who handles his affairs in such a manner, and nor should anyone else be, except others who run to the courts every time they want something done and don't want to be bothered with effort, the truth, or common courtesy.
There ya go, Steve. I've sent a copy of this message to you under separate cover as I don't wish to disclose my e-gold list password to you. But, you have created a big bowl of worms. If you don't enjoy the taste, you might want to avoid asking your customers to dine. And force feeding your non-customers seems like a bad approach.
Has your court order and lawyer fee already cost you $3260? I bet it has. And has the very bad publicity also cost you $3260 in lost orders, like Frank's? I bet it would.
This industry needs help. We need mechanisms for safely and quickly contacting legitimate participants so we can work out problems without court orders. We need mechanisms for dispute resolution which don't involve courts and lawyers. And we need better use of jurisdictional arbitrage to protect our assets. We may say that the GDCA has its work cut out for it.
Meanwhile, nothing we do to improve things can ever overcome the simple precaution of not spending gold where you don't mean for it to go.
Regards,
Jim http://goldbarterholdings.com/ http://cambist.net/ http://www.gdcaonline.org/
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