LEGO Group banned user for buying bricks from official store and BrickLink | Hacker News Reader

LEGO Group banned user for buying bricks from official store and BrickLink

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I didn't get a clear sense from her side on what happened. Or maybe I did?

She ordered something and it was lost during delivery? Some system flagged fraud and then as penalty for this she lost access to essentially everything LEGO. Later she found out about this ban via an email that closes all communication without any path to further followup. Now she can't shop or use her LEGO Account for anything.

Surely I missed something.

Yes I gather:

1) her order was lost by aus post

2) she told Lego it never arrived, they made a replacement order

3) aus post found her lego after being prodded

4) some anti-fraud system decided she was trying to scamaz

5) their fraud dept doesn't care about false positives

Aus post (australia post) is the worst, especially this time of year.

I have had that happen twice with Amazon (book) orders, they get lost, then only to arrive 2 months later (after Amazon has resent a replacement order)

I have to disagree. AusPost is pretty good. It's not perfect but given the stories you hear about USPS from the US, AusPost is undoubtedly doing a better job.

EDIT: I should've said "postage in the US", not USPS. My response was in relation to someone saying that it is "the worst". I've had much worse experiences with private shipping companies like StarTrack.

What stories? Most stories I hear about USPS are complaints about waiting in line. Otherwise USPS ranks pretty high, internationally, for quality of service.

In the Universal Postal Union’s report for 2018, US ranked #8. Australia ranked #26.

And it's not like the USPS lines are meaningfully longer than Fedex or UPS, even in a city.

I think it's just anti-government hyperbole to pretend that taking an envelope from your hand to a farm house on the other side of the country for 55 cents and having a line for such an amazing service is too big an ask.

It would take just as long at Fedex or UPS. They're private. They don't mail anything for 55 cents. They're usually more expensive for packages even.

It's really pretty amazing.

USPS definitely has/had a reputation, but your post made me realize, I haven't had any negative experiences with them in as long as I care to remember. If I had to complain, it's that sometimes packages say they're delivered a day before they actually arrive.

USPS is one of only two couriers I'll actually select if I get a choice. They put my packages in my mailbox (I realize others legally can't) or if it doesn't fit, they bring the packages to my door and knock. UPS is the other.

Other couriers place packages on my driveway, halfway down my stairs, or in other weird places. Occasionally one of them will actually come all the way down the stairs, but they won't knock.

I reported missing mail, and USPS was on the fix the very next morning.

Other than that, I've never had a problem except for waiting in line and being served by an intentionally slow employee.

I'm with you. Maybe I'm just lucky but I've never had AusPost go wrong and their local delivery staff are all really friendly.

Aus post doesn't even bother to knock on your door. They just toss a card in the slot. Even if you see it happen and grab them, they'll probably tell you they don't even have the package; don't bother to actually transport them. None of them work for AusPost. In big cities like Melbourne, they're almost all contractors. In far off places like Emerald, it's all you got, because DHL doesn't deliver out there (or if they do, it's a lie and those packages get handed to an AusPost contractor anyway).

Cockatoo was a huge pain the ass to get anything delivered to.

I've caught them not delivering stuff before (opened the gate at 7am to go catch the train and an AusPost fella was just putting the card in our mailbox - those gates were very loud when they opened up + I was in the kitchen getting ready to go, so there's no way we missed them)and they didn't even apologise, just looked sheepish and got my parcel out of the van.

That said, the current AusPost delivery driver assigned to my neighborhood is a nice African (Sudanese?) chap who always at least tried to deliver stuff, will try and hide it from the street if it's marked safe to leave by the door, etc. and if you go to a post office they're usually pretty good.

If they treated delivery drivers like human beings I'm sure auspost's customer satisfaction would greatly increase

Characteristic story: postie piles 10,000 pieces of undelivered mail in his house. Nobody notices until he chucks some in the bin and a neighbor spots undelivered mail spilling out of a trash bag.

https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/australia-post-m...

I had a set of injectors sent from Sydney to Perth the other day, and they arrived in three days with Aus Post. They SMS'd me in the morning that they were being delivered, and let me specify whether to leave it at the door or collect from the post office.

They've definitely improved a lot in recent times.

The AusPost SMS thing is a bit weird. Sometimes it'll be "You didn't reply in time" even if you reply immediately, and from my message history it seems there's no acknowledgement if you do actually succeed.

AusPost aren't the sharpest. I had a mail redirection in place while i was travelling. I sent a bunch of items home. Everything good. Months later I let the redirection expire. Suddenly 90% of my mail failed. I contacted a bunch of senders who said my address was invalid. At the time I didn't make the connection between the mail redirection and delivery problems.

I logged a ticket with AusPost. They couldn't figure out the problem. I still lost mail. They said some guy had gone on holiday. This issue went on for months. I logged another ticket. This was suburban Melbourne not some remote town with a auspost agency only contactable by llamas by the light of the full moon.

No better response. Both tickets auto-closed with no actual resolution. All the while some letters/packages got through and others didn't. A bunch of online sellers had to resend my stuff to an alternate address because the relevant portion of AusPost for my address were too stupid to sort this out. Every courier not connected to AusPost delivered perfectly.

Then all of a sudden around a year later my problems disappeared.

Moral of story: something fishy was going on. Auspost can't debug their own redirections. Delivery problems can really mess up your reputation. Get some kind of workaround from your side operational ASAP.

Yes I had a lock on my letterbox. Yes I was home when packages were delivered. It got so hilarious we'd sit with laptop on front porch. The guy would turn up with the "You weren't home card" then would have to go get the package out of his van.

Make sure you read the rest here: https://mobile.twitter.com/aurorastormG3/status/120611793955...

He doesn’t even know why they’ve banned him. And just like Google, there is no appeal or ability to get more info.

I'm pretty sure it's a "she"/"her" judging from her twitter profile.

Seems to be her/princess. If princess is concerned about what pronouns people use, then princess wouldn't like "she".

I cannot stand these companies who have these “we can’t change our decision” and “refuse to provide more info” policies.

These types of policies are bad for customers. They should be banned.

Good thing he only got banned from LEGO and not, lets say, automated grocery stores all owned by the same company and associated with your Amazon account...

Well, no need to worry ahead of time!

2020 prediction: Amazon buys LEGO.

June 2020: lead found in all LEGO bricks ... how does lead even get into non-metal toys? Life finds a way.

Maybe speculating, but possibly he ordered too many (free) replacement parts from the LEGO store?

I had to do this once and there seemingly are no checks in place to prevent abuse. (You don’t have to prove you own the set where you are missing pieces from)

Also the OP bringing up Bricklink (which doesn’t use Lego account for login) is a bit dramatic, which makes me thing the poster is skewing or omitting some facts.

She goes by female pronouns, it says so in her Twitter bio.

This is why I personally tend to refer to people on the internet as 'them/they/their', or by their username, limiting any possible pronoun specific arguments or the chance of offending people.

Yep. Gender-neutral pronouns is the way to go. It's about more than just offending people. It's also about (mis|under)representation and subconscious biases.

I understand your perspective, but 'generic he' is grammatically correct for uncertain, unspecified or gender neutral contexts in English.

I've corrected my comment since you've informed me that gender is relevant in this context, but it is more pedantry than correction.

To be even more pedantic, "they" has been used as a gender-neutral pronoun for over 600 years.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/word-of-the-ye...

Damn, I knew them buying bricklink was going to be terrible.

Yeah, same feelings.

Also LDraw.org[0] (open-source digital lego community) still has no official word from LEGO Group members to LDraw Ambassador about acquiring of BrickLink, as BrickLink's Stud.io app use LDraw Parts Library.[1]

FTR, Ten members of the LDraw core met at the LEGO headquarter in Billund on May 22-26, 2019. (...) they also had a meeting with people from the LDD team and other compartments of the company. A request for a dedicated information channel when it comes down to part numbers, meshes or colours was forwarded.[2]

[0] https://www.ldraw.org/

[1] https://forums.ldraw.org/thread-23768.html

[2] https://forums.ldraw.org/thread-23439.html

I wrote BrickLink a message about creating a new category on the platform.

I got a reply addressing me with the name of my mum which they surely got from a Lego-database, since my mum is probably listed as a customer there.

* amateurs.

How do you get banned from an online store? Can't you just use a different credit card and they'll have no way of knowing? Seems quite pointless to me, unless your goal is to make your best customers your unhappiest customers, which seems like a pretty bad idea.

"we've decided not to accept any further orders from your account", not necessarily the human being behind the account.

In the US at least, there are loyalty points you earn when making purchases (it used to be effectively 5% off), and those would have been lost when the account was banned

They could ban your home address, so you'd have to go get a post box instead?

I thought about that, but people move, people can live in apartment buildings with thousands of neighbors, and people can have packages delivered to their work address or a convenience store. None of those are even corners cases.

I just find it baffling that someone would write a letter that boils down to "We are punishing you!! But there is no way to enforce this punishment, so, uh... umm..." Seems like a huge waste of time if you ask me.

You can't be banned from all the stores either... No one knows who you are when you go in one.

He could just pay someone to order for him. Perhaps a friend. There might even be businesses in Australia that do that.

Edit: She ...

And hey, it's never too early to learn.

Edit: Seriously, what's so horrible about working around a clearly unjust ban?

She has said she hasn't even tried to make a bricklink account yet. Hopefully she tries and is able to order that way.

The increasingly common pattern of corporations issuing ultimatums without apparent explanation, justification, or any other kind of due process is really terrifying. How do we fix this?

The only way to fix this is to use only open-source software & hardware solutions + decentralized networks. But it's too hard for common users.

"Due process"?? Buying Legos from the official store is not some kind of inherent human right. They can sell to whom they want. No doubt this person was breaking the terms of service. Explaining why he's banned would likely give away something about how they know he was cheating the system, which makes future fraud easier.

Seems like it's new reality of online services, for example Instagram just rolled out "offensive captions checker"[0], that's look like beta-release of Orwell's «Thought Police».[1]

[0] https://twitter.com/instagram/status/1206637381224259584

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_Police

Ah yes, the well known Orwellian police state tactic of politely asking users not to call each other stupid.

"No doubt this person was breaking the terms of service."

Was there more information outside of the linked twitter thread?

Nor is it an inherent right to operate a business to sell Legos in any given country.

Instead, they operate in countries that allow them to do business there. The people in many of those countries, whether due to "inherent human right" or because they fought for it, have the right to vote and elect representatives to make laws.

So if those people decide that companies can't just ban people from doing business with them without "due process", they can put that into law.

I don't personally buy into the idea that anything is an "inherent human right," it's all social contract from my perspective. Businesses are subject to it as well.

At this point until there are regulations on how you can be banned and how you can litigate bans from websites etc.

Maybe they have a policy limiting people from purchasing too much lego either to prevent reselling or from stopping people from becoming whales like in mobile games.

To be honest the community should have already abandoned bricklink when it was sold to the nexon founder. It is their own fault for continuing to support the website. People always make the mistake, the first time a small company sells it is usually good afterwards but the second time it sells it is rarely good afterwards.

Also this would not be as much of an issue if antitrust were enforced. It is absurd that Lego can own the secondary market of its own product.

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