Charging cards and shipping nothing

How do they get away with this?

[HRoth]

I found that a company I bought something from and that hasn't shipped it or responded to email and is not answering their phone has a number of complaints against them for charging cards and shipping nothing. I looked up the owner on whois and find that he owns a number of businesses, maybe 20 or more, all at the same address, and guess what, all of them have numerous complaints about the exact same thing: charging cards and sending nothing. These go back sometimes as far as December 2010. What I want to know is how does someone like this keep the ability to charge cards? This I can't figure out.

[incrediBILL]

I can't answer that but making CHARGEBACKS will slow him down.

The more chargebacks he gets, the CC company will take notices and shut them down.

[dpd1]

Yeah, I don't get that stuff either.

There was a guy I ran into years ago that decided to write this "review" about one of my products. Most of it was complete nonsense and I made the mistake of confronting him. I politely asked him in an email why he felt that way. Well, that's all it took to set this nut off and make me his project.

So he wrote up a big thing on his site telling everybody they shouldn't buy anything from me. The ironic part... A year later, the guy got popped by the postal inspectors for fraud through the mail. What did he do? Sell stuff he didn't have, and never ship it. He eventually got out and not a single one of his sites were taken down. He again went to jail for the same thing, and his sites are still up... on the same host.

Why do companies allow loosers like this to keep using their services? I have no idea.

[Staffa]

Greed may be the most likely answer

[dpd1]

If a company is willing to help somebody con hundreds of people out of thousands of dollars for years, just so they can keep getting their $9.95 a month hosting fee. I'd say that has to be the epitome of greed.

[HRoth]

I thought if you had a lot of chargebacks that they would cancel your ability to take cards. Maybe you just have to pay a higher discount rate, so it's worth it for these thieves, since they don't have the cost of actually buying the product they're supposedly selling (this is not the first time I have come across this)? 'Cause I can't figure it out otherwise. I also looked around the Mastercard site to see if there was anywhere to report a merchant who consistently is a thief. There isn't. I did report this guy to the CA Attorney General's office, but who knows if that will ever make a difference. It makes me mad, because it really does seem to be the case that Mastercard is okay if a merchant is ripping people off as long as they can get the chargeback fees and the discount fees. I am baffled by this.

And now honestly, I do not feel comfortable about buying this item from ANY online shop. That is what these thieves do. I just feel like I will get ripped off again and have to go through all this rigamarole again.

[Leosghost]

Pertinent ( albeit an old article ..the case has been discussed here before re the "ranking" aspects)..particularly the part about a certain number of complaints per month to the credit card companies..above the number might get the merchant a problem ..under the number ..the merchant will not have problem ..and that basically the banks and credit card companies don't care..

[nytimes.com...]

[HRoth]

That's right--I forgot about that guy. This thief also comes up high in Google. Hopefully, the same thing that smashed him will smash this thief: the state attorney general.

[piatkow]

Remember that customers may also raise false chargebacks or may mistakenly raise a chargeback when already refunded so the existence of chargebacks alone does not indicate a fraudulent merchant.

In the OP's situation the only recourse is to chargeback if a credit card was used and to report the matter to the appropriate law enforcement agency.

[HRoth]

That's what I did, piatkow. Just got a letter today acknowledging my communication about this to the CA State Attorney General's office. They are sending a letter to the company in question. Hopefully that will throw a bit of a scare into the guy, although it would be nice if they simply put them in jail for wire fraud.

I did find that I no longer am willing to buy this item online from ANY merchant, even though it is an ordinary item. I just feel like there is no way to tell in advance whether they are thieves or not. This does make me wonder how many customers I have not had become someone else out there ripped them off like this.

[piatkow]

I just feel like there is no way to tell in advance whether they are thieves or not.

Not a definitive guide but I have a strong preference for merchants with a B&M presence. Easier in the UK where half the country (and a lot more of the population) can be reached in a round trip inside office hourse.

[HRoth]

Yeah, these guys are a three-day drive from here. If they were in the same state, I would have given them a visit.

[bwnbwn]

HRoth ahh before you go classifing all of us there are a few smart things before you go to buying off a site.

Check for a contact if there isn't one don't buy. If there is call answer machine, don't buy, speak to a live person from the country your ordering in. If the person that answers the phone is from another country and you can confirm it don't buy.

Always do a little digging in the site to make sure just common sense crap will prevent this from happening again.

There are plenty of honest harworking merchants out there that take offense to this type of attitude.

I suppose if you ever got a bad meal at a place to eat then you would never ever go out to eat again?

[dpd1]

Actually, I took more offense to the things YOU said. lol

I would not necessarily say that just because somebody doesn't have a live phone, address, and everything setup, that that's a big red flag. There's many people that use their home as a base (myself included), and we simply can't put up an address. Tried it once and actually had people knocking on my door. Obviously a PO is meaningless. We also can't afford to have somebody answering the phone. If I did that I'd never get anything done. So I guess I failed the test and nobody should buy from me.

I think the best way to go about it, is just do a search on the biz name. If people have been scammed, they are not going to be shy about blabbing it to everybody. Put in the name, then some words like "never sent", "ripped off", or whatever. If they've been doing it a lot, you will definitely see something come up. Then on the other hand, you could probably find a few negatives for virtually every biz on the web. So one complaint doesn't make them bad necessarily.

I personally don't shop by price. That's my thing. I stick with known places. When you start getting into the little nondescript places that seem to focus on the cheapest price, that's something that I don;t like.

[bwnbwn]

No offense taken either. I as well have a home buz but we manage to answer the phone most of the times. I would put if u had a problem with a showup is add "No inside sales internet only you will not get through security" This should stop that. There are really some good afforadable answering services that are US based that do a good job and one you should look into.

I am not look for the cheapest type buyer either by a long shot. Been in this buz to long and know the really low ballers are short lived (not all of them) just most. I usually always check the above so yes you would fail on me, but with a little investment and some good wording I would buy off your site then.

Oh yea another one I never buy from are ssl's in a different name then the domain. This just needs to be done for a site to be trusted IMO.

[HRoth]

I was not looking for the cheapest widget. I shopped from this site because it actually does have a real-world contact address listed and a phone number prominently displayed. I don't call places I order from online typically. One of the reasons for ordering online is that it is faster. Calling adds time. I also did not check on the background of this business because the purchase was about $50 and frankly, I have had good luck ordering online since 1994 and only got ripped off once until this thing. That was from a mom-and-pop. When I went to look at Google street view at this address, it turned out to be a warehouse type thing in an industrial park. I would never have spent the time to do that in advance.

I myself have moved the street address of my online shop to a place buried in my contact page, because even though I said all over my site that my business was online only, I would get people just turning up wanting to shop in my store. I don't use a PO box, although I have in the past and have thought about going back to that.

I have to say honestly I will never buy this item online again. I will only buy it from brick-and-mortar stores in my area. To heck with it. These sites are large catalog type sites that have jillions of pages of stuff they are basically drop shipping. I have always thought of that as a bogus business model anyhow.

Believe it or not, I just got an email from these thieves saying they will send my order in two weeks. I told them to go back and read my email from 10 days ago and refund me. They said they would. It is only because I said I notified the CA State Attorney General's office and they apparently also got the letter from them that they are refunding me (if they even do). They have lied and lied and stayed in business with this kind of bogus site and are at the very TOP of search results in Google and Bing for this item.

This whole thing even made me trigger-happy when another item I had bought from a similar larger catalog type site didn't arrive immediately, and I emailed them asking if they were thieves. I never normally act like this. But seriously, I will not buy from a site like this again. Ever.

'Course, there are plenty of other suckers out there ready to be ripped off who won't file a chargeback or don't even know they have such an option, so people who run this kind of business are in no peril--until the complaints to the state attorney general's office pile up and they get off their behinds and actually do something about it, which in my state, they most certainly do. I don't know about CA.

So yeah, if you rip me off I will hammer you into the ground. Other customers are probably not as vengeful as I am.

[bwnbwn]

hroth if more acted as you I would suspect this would make the web a better place. I am the same way I guess from how we run our ecommerce I expect the same. I don't have an issue if the order is delayed just let me know give me the option to have my order cancelled or wait. This is the right way let the customer know what's going on don't make them do as you had to do to get an answer.

[dpd1]

This whole thing even made me trigger-happy when another item I had bought from a similar larger catalog type site didn't arrive immediately, and I emailed them asking if they were thieves.

Well, lets not get too crazy. lol I mean, imagine if you got an email like that from a customer. I had a person make a comment like that one time... I instantly gave them a refund. Then they started whining about THAT. I told them... Hey, I work way too hard and am way too honest to be called names, when I haven't even done anything wrong. There's your money... Don't ever buy anything from me again.

We can't allow ourselves to punish everyone for the sins of a minority.

[HRoth]

I know. I emailed them back saying I was sorry and why I'd said it. It will make me look differently, though, at precisely those customers that you describe and I have gotten too, that are so quick to accuse me of ripping them off when they don't get something immediately. I always thought they were just crazy or spoiled, but maybe some of them are reacting to similar experiences.

[dpd1]

Oh, I guarantee that's why they're doing it a lot of times. But still... I will reassure people when they're paranoid. But I draw the line at name calling. Luckily I work in a small niche where a lot of people know me or talked to someone who knows me. So the trust is usually there to begin. But it's funny... I can tell right away when somebody stumbled in from a search and has no idea who I am. They often have a different tone about them.