I just got my package of new earphones from Best Buy, and the box was fucking empty. I mean there is the box and instruction manuals and charging cable, but the actual earphones aren’t there. They’ve used Shipt (which is like a doordash but for packages) but the box was inside another layer of packaging which was supposedly sealed before the delivery person got it so I’m leaning towards it being store employee theft, or someone returned an empty box and the employees didn’t verify it.
I’ll be contacting Bestbuy and Credit Card issuer as soon as customer support hours start.
I’ve literally never lost a package, I’m just so, annoyed. The money will probably be back, but like dude I just wanna listen to some music. Ugh… I guess phone speakers will have to do for now.
PSA: Record a video when opening packages just in case you need to file a dispute. I didn’t but I don’t think there’s gonna be an issue since these things rarely happen to me and disputes are rarely filed.
So have you ever been defrauded?
Update: I used the customer support chat and told BestBuy about it, and they gave me a replacement, this time I picked it up at the store and opened the box right in front of the employee just to be safe. Nothing was missing this time. 😀
I once thought “Amazon refurbished” was a program by Amazon…
Turns out they just throw that label on random companies that refurbished on their own.
Bought a cellphone from one, they sent me the wrong phone model, and I paid for unlocked and they sent me one locked to a different carrier, then said that carrier was the most popular (it’s not) and they assumed it was what I wanted.
When I was complaining about that, they told me all I had to do was put it in a UPS drop box, explicitly told me I didn’t have to go to a store.
According to them, they never got the return.
I talked to Amazon, and their customer service just flat out lied and told me they could see the return was in transit.
Weeks later Amazon tried to charge me for the phone, and I had to do a charge back. Because apparently following the sellers instructions to put it in a drop off, meant I couldn’t prove I mailed it.
I have no idea if I was sent the wrong phone intentionally as a scam where they were always going to say they didn’t get the return, but it definitely felt like it by the end of it
A few weeks ago I shipped a package USPS and I wanted to track it’s progress. I googled USPS tracking and clicked on the first link that popped up. The search result looked like the USPS website and said USPS .com and had the same preview text that the actual website used but it was actually a Google ad that redirected me to supertracking .com. This fake website looked exactly like the USPS tracking website, the domain the web browser displayed was wrong but everything on the page was right, the buttons on the bottom and top even sent you back to the official USPS site. The fake site was set up so that no matter what you entered it would say the address was wrong and you had to update it for a $1.50 address update fee. I would have grown suspicious here except I actually did put the wrong zip code down when I shipped it. Again all the forms looked legit so I put my credit card info in after updating the address, then it wanted me to confirm my bank account login and pin. This is where I stopped because there is no reason for them to collect that data. I saw it was the wrong website and looked back in my history and sure enough I clicked on an ad without realizing it. I reported the domain, reported the ad, and cancelled my credit card. It was really scary how real the website felt, I didn’t suspect anything until they wanted bank info.
These ads are getting so much more prevalent, and so much more subtly marked. Google (and places like reddit and Facebook) designs them to feel as much like organic content as possible. I have a pihole on my home network, in part to prevent exactly the type of mistake you described.
One way that google explicitly enables these types of scams is by allowing advertisers to display a fake url in the ad footer. Ostensibly this is so advertisers can link to an intermediary 3rd-party tracking url instead of the target page without scaring the customers, but this is precisely what allows scammers to display usps.com in the link to a fraud site. Google even uses javascript to display the fake url in the browser tooltip when you hover over the link!
Several years ago, my credit card number was used to buy airplane tickets on a different continent. No big deal, right? I disputed the transaction with my credit card company and expected that to be the end of it. By the way, I had the card in my possession the whole time.
They wrote back and said they confirmed that the charge was legitimate, made in person, and I was responsible for the total amount.
I asked how they confirmed it (they never answered that) and explained that it was very hard for me to be 1/3 of the way across the planet while also making purchases at home such as gas and groceries. I was at work, made purchases with their card at the same time, and had toll booth records — lots of supporting evidence that I never went there to make the purchase.
It didn’t matter, they stuck to the story that it was made in person and was authentic. One of the letters from them said that they had asked the airline who in turn told them I was there doing it in person, but that was the only hint at the process I got.
I’m upset but busy with life, new baby, work, etc. so about a week goes by and another letter comes from them saying that my dispute was successful and I don’t owe the money. It was short, had very little information, and there was no answers to any of the questions I’d asked (questions about the bank policy for disputes, if the decision is final, how they verified I was in another country, how they know my card was there).
In the end, I got my money back but no closure on what happened. It was six years ago and I still feel frustrated about it.
my partner, her friend and I traveled to another city 4 hours away to go see a musical. my partner found the accomodation on booking.com
when we got to where the apartment should be, we couldn’t find it. we looked around for ages to no avail. found a police station nearby. we asked them if they knew of the address. they pointed to the building across the street they said had been abandoned for 5 years. when we tried to call the host it went thru to an international phoneline in a different language.
oof
I ordered a Noctua CPU cooler from Amazon a few years ago. It was sold to me as new, and it definitely looked new, but when I opened the package to the it out and install it, it was missing several components. It had obviously been opened and either used or at least taken apart, then put back in the packaging.
I didn’t feel scammed necessarily, but it was extremely annoying. I had no trouble with Amazon taking it back and sending me a new one. Honestly the only reason I think you’d have trouble is if your account has a history of questionable or large returns.
If it’s sold by Amazon, Amazon will eat the cost on most stuff and allow returns for pretty much anything
If it’s “fulfilled by Amazon” they can’t just eat the cost. Either the seller or buyer has to pay.
It can be hard to tell which is which before buying.
On Amazon’s website. Directly below the “Add to Cart” and “Buy it Now” buttons it tells you exactly who is selling it and who is shipping it. I’m not sure where the difficulty lies in checking?
Because sometimes it says “refurbished by Amazon”…
Would you assume that means Amazon is the seller? I did, and I was wrong.
