I had a disreputable eBay seller use a similar trick: The Apple product they sold turned out to be counterfeit (unbeknownst to them, they claimed), so they took down the original eBay listing. For some reason, eBay prohibits you from leaving feedback for sellers on orders from listings that are taken down in this way. So this seller still has like 99.7% positive feedback and continues operating even though they at best wasted the time of dozens/hundreds of people who received counterfeit goods and either didn't notice or had to fight for a refund.
Had an eBay seller sell me refurbished hard drives as brand new. I purchased new Western Digital Red 5k, they sent refurbished 10k enterprise drives with 5k stickers.
High 99% feedback, large numbers marked as sold.
Ok contacting the seller saying I got refurbished drive with the reported drive stats I got abusive phone calls saying they have my address, they don’t sell fakes, they are going to come to my house and teach me a lesson calling the drive fakes. Turned out the registered address was 2000 km away at some random suburban residential address, the person on the phone had broken English phoning from a Thai phone number so I wasn’t to worried about that and laughed it off and said good luck.
I contacted eBay, left a poor review saying received fake goods, got threats of violence from the seller. eBay refunded my money and a week later my review was removed for the seller to continue scamming customers which must be many by the items sold and number of reviews.
I ignore positive reviews now. They are curated so not worth any substance if bad reviews get removed.
RE "......the person on the phone had broken English phoning from a Thai phone number......" Probably a person that works at the hard drive factory IN Thialand. Hard drive capacity reduced in this way when part of the drive has a problem. Maybe its a warranty return. I would complain directly to Western Digital . If the problem was detected at factory, most likely it never would have had a 10K sticker put on ....
Next day delivery.. you pay, it ships, then delivery estimate gets an "oops you're delivery had a problem and has been rescheduled for 6 weeks in the future".
Can't refund as it has been shipped, and the original listing disappears after a couple of days "listing not found", so no feedback possible either.
The last thing I bought on Amazon was a potato peeler. Instead of the quality European peeler I paid for, I received a cheap Chinese peeler that bent the first time I tried it. No returns allowed because the item was considered "dangerous".
You'd think that a consistent customer would be worth more than $30, but apparently not to Amazon. They wouldn't make it right so I shop elsewhere now.
> No returns allowed because the item was considered "dangerous".
If you have prime, talk to customer support until you get the answer you want to hear. In general, they have been extremely supportive of all the various issues I've run across, but then again, I buy a lot of stuff from there.
I only ask because your post begins "if you have prime".
Resolving a situation where a different, cheap, unusable item is delivered is absolute basic customer service which was paid for when GP bought it, regardless of how frequent/premium of a customer they are.
You can't shop at costco without being a member, I don't see how that's related.
The other reply was my experience too. Ordered a large box of a food product, arrived expiration date the same week (technically a best by date, but I doubt it would be good by the time I finished all of it). The site said no returns on food, contacted support, got a chatbot that told me the same. Went through to a person and they credited my account.
It sounds like Facebook Marketplace. I bought counterfeit AirPods Max. They showed up as legitimate in the phone so I thought they were good, but they were fake. Before I realized what happened the seller blocked me, which apparently prevents leaving feedback. I contacted Facebook about the fraud that went into a black hole.
I had found someone else scammed by the same seller and I was annoyed enough to go to the police. The police called it a civil matter and refused to do anything. Obviously I didn’t have the seller’s real name so I couldn’t pursue that angle. I saw from another Facebook account that the seller is still hawking counterfeit goods. So, I guess that’s effectively legal.
The ridiculous thing I learned recently is that negative EBay feedback falls off after 12 months. Helped explain why I keep buying things from 100% positive feedback sellers and receiving broken junk…
The seller tried to only refund half the purchase amount because I didn't have the original box it was sent in. (I threw the box away before I realized the item was counterfeit.) I had to appeal his partial refund to eBay, who agreed with me that if someone sells you counterfeit crap they have to fully refund you even without the box.
After exchanging several emails with the seller, it was clear that he believed that as long as he gave refunds when people sent everything back to him in mint condition, he had done nothing wrong and did not deserve to have his reputation damaged. The problem with that, obviously, is that he wasted the time of dozens/hundreds of people, and defrauded people who did not notice the item was counterfeit. (People only got refunds if they noticed and requested; they were not automatically told they could get one, as an honest seller would have done.)
Under the current system, sellers face little incentive to make sure they aren't unwittingly acting as a fence for stolen/counterfeit good. Without reputational hits, they only have to reimburse buyers for the purchase price, not for the time wasted, and many/most buyers won't bother to return it anyways.
