“Subject: Urgent Warning”
Ah, this sort of thing is as old as the moon.<p>We run an eCommerce platform, have a variety of clients using it, they have a number of customers. At least once a week we get an accusation either from a client or an end-user of some outlandish nefarious behaviour, usually due to some complete lack of understanding of the nature of technology.<p>Way back when, we responded, tried to help, tried to explain, but it tends to be the case that if someone has made their mind up, they&#x27;ve made their mind up, and anything you say can and will be used against you - confirmation bias is a harsh mistress.<p>The best response is usually no response, I&#x27;m afraid to say. It&#x27;s a drain on your time, they won&#x27;t be any the wiser unless you&#x27;re prepared to sink serious time into educating a stranger, and more often than not responding results in escalation, and people doing stupid things like involving lawyers and law enforcement.<p>Case in point: About six years ago, we had an older guy phone us up frothing about how we&#x27;d hacked his wife&#x27;s computer and she&#x27;d accidentally bought something from one of our clients. We explained that it would be hard to accidentally enter your address and credit card details, and that if they didn&#x27;t want the order they should contact the merchant, not the web developer (they clicked our &quot;ecommerce by&quot; link in the footer of the client site - we don&#x27;t do that any more!). We thought that was that. A week later we got a stern phone call from an ombudsman who wanted to know why we were ignoring the distance selling rules and taking advantage of old people... and they didn&#x27;t understand that we weren&#x27;t a merchant, didn&#x27;t place an order on their behalf, either - so months of time were wasted, and we narrowly avoided ending up in court over a non-issue.<p>Anyway. When you have a conversation with an idiot, nobody watching can tell which one of you is the idiot.