Guys you are misreading this. CloudFlare wanted out of the relationship at all costs, period. OP openly admits to using CF to rotate IP's in case one of theirs gets banned by a gambling regulatory body. Think about it, if they wanted to keep the relationship they would have found a way, but obviously they weren't trying to negotiate.
Obviously this is terrible PR and bad corporate communication, but the truth is probably that CF's legal/risk department didn't want to create a bunch of discovery on an email server somewhere that could be subpoenaed. So they made a high-ball offer in bad faith to find an excuse to kill the relationship. Maybe they would have accepted the extra money if the offer had been accepted (because it is a business), but probably they figured they needed that because the risk/reward profile was out of whack.
The risk managers made them do it. CF was making very little money from this and they were running very high risks by enabling the customer to break the law by violating ToS (which they openly admit to doing). You guys are trashing CF for being a bad actor but read between the lines, if they wanted to keep the account they wouldn't have summarily deleted the entire thing at the slightest provocation.
I have no sympathy for the OP. Gambling destroys people's lives. Some people have no ability to control themselves, and it's a tax on the stupid. If you want to use someone else's services to violate ToS then you should expect to be rugpulled. If you've ever dealt with litigation holds or subpoenas from a prosecutor's office before you will realize that it gets insanely expensive VERY FAST, so the price tag CF demanded was probably commensurate with the risk profile of the customer.
The real scandal here is that CF may have indeed been willing to just take the $120k and look the other way to continue to facilitate the customer's [probably] illegal activities. To me that's what's shady. The ethical thing to do would have been to just inform them they were in violation of ToS and shut them down. Clearly there are no shortage of ethical issues on all sides here.
Yup. CF CEO's mind right before the first email interaction:
"We can either do axe $250/m or profit from poor gambling addicts and improve our bottom line... lol... it's time for our gamble"
Thanks to this drama I learned that I can safely strike Cloudflare from my list of hosting options for future projects. The "gambling is bad" was obvious already.
Guys you are misreading this. CloudFlare wanted out of the relationship at all costs, period. OP openly admits to using CF to rotate IP's in case one of theirs gets banned by a gambling regulatory body. Think about it, if they wanted to keep the relationship they would have found a way, but obviously they weren't trying to negotiate.
Obviously this is terrible PR and bad corporate communication, but the truth is probably that CF's legal/risk department didn't want to create a bunch of discovery on an email server somewhere that could be subpoenaed. So they made a high-ball offer in bad faith to find an excuse to kill the relationship. Maybe they would have accepted the extra money if the offer had been accepted (because it is a business), but probably they figured they needed that because the risk/reward profile was out of whack.
The risk managers made them do it. CF was making very little money from this and they were running very high risks by enabling the customer to break the law by violating ToS (which they openly admit to doing). You guys are trashing CF for being a bad actor but read between the lines, if they wanted to keep the account they wouldn't have summarily deleted the entire thing at the slightest provocation.
I have no sympathy for the OP. Gambling destroys people's lives. Some people have no ability to control themselves, and it's a tax on the stupid. If you want to use someone else's services to violate ToS then you should expect to be rugpulled. If you've ever dealt with litigation holds or subpoenas from a prosecutor's office before you will realize that it gets insanely expensive VERY FAST, so the price tag CF demanded was probably commensurate with the risk profile of the customer.
The real scandal here is that CF may have indeed been willing to just take the $120k and look the other way to continue to facilitate the customer's [probably] illegal activities. To me that's what's shady. The ethical thing to do would have been to just inform them they were in violation of ToS and shut them down. Clearly there are no shortage of ethical issues on all sides here.
Yup. CF CEO's mind right before the first email interaction:
"We can either do axe $250/m or profit from poor gambling addicts and improve our bottom line... lol... it's time for our gamble"
Thanks to this drama I learned that I can safely strike Cloudflare from my list of hosting options for future projects. The "gambling is bad" was obvious already.