There are so fucking many basic frauds like that going on now, because they’re allowed to happen until enough people are pissed off enough to make a class action suit or something, which won’t happen at the size of these ripoffs, which are annoying but not the kind of thing that most people want to spend a lot of their life fighting.

Last year my wife had a debilitating foot infection, and needed surgical shoes. There were none available locally, so she ordered them through an online outlet. They took her money, never shipped. They replied to the first email, then stopped. Their customer service line kept us on hold for fifteen minutes at a time, would say we were next in line, then hang up. I looked into it, and discovered hundreds of complaints exactly like hours, and that furthermore the supposed customer service line was shared by several supposed online companies, all of them with hundreds of complaints. This was the first company to come up in Google under the kind of shoes Velma needed. Our bank reversed the charges, but did Google do anything about the listing? Did they even reply to my email? Ha.

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So, first they tried expanding their use of #3 from above. I submitted a number of rebates, all at the same time, all with the same process and they denied about 10% of them (actually they claimed they never “received” them). The NY attorney general (Eliot Spitzer) came down on them for that.

Next, they jacked up all their prices by 5-10x, so they could withstand the higher return rates. That apparently didn’t work either.

Finally, they declared bankruptcy, leaving about $80 million worth of rebates unpaid.

Most banks covered their customers’ credit card loss. However, Discover and American Express did not, claiming the rebate was not purchased as part of the item. That’s why I now only use Visa and MC through smaller local banks and try to avoid rebates.

Can you tell I’m bitter?

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