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They did a similar thing to me. They even added on fraud during my CC dispute as the cherry on the top. But I don't have a large social media following so I'm just out my $700.

Sue them in small claims court. They won't show. you'll win by default.

Which gets me nothing without a way to collect. And is not practical due to arbitration clause and service issues.

Simply going through the process of a small courts claim will likely get your money back. They will not send a lawyer to the small claims court hearing and they will settle. Even if you make a bunch of mistakes with your small claims process, the court will never review it before the hearing. Newegg will not have their lawyers spend time dealing with your mistakes.

Send a demand letter and if they don't respond, do the small claims court paper work. The hardest part is serving Newegg a notice. You can pay a professional to serve the paperwork. If you're willing to stick it to them, you will very likely see your $700 + fees. Most people won't do it because they feel intimidated or can't be bothered with the work.

Have you actually done it?

Either way, this was 5 years ago and beyond the SOL

It seems like credit card chargebacks are designed for exactly this situation.

I did and Newegg committed fraud during the process. Newegg responded to my dispute saying they had no record of me returning the item despite tracking and e-mail confirmation that they received it.

The credit card company will accept your paper trail. They can check with the shipping company. The fact they lied about it should make it even more clear-cut.

I haven’t researched but this feels quite plausible. I think it’s important to remember how few people could be involved in this decisions, there could possibly be just two people on the Newegg side making the majority of these calls.

Does the number of people matter?

If you make a decision as part of your work, that decision is de facto made by the company. Even if this was one person making $12/hr who made every single decision related to this story, it's still Newegg making the decisions. Newegg only gets a pass if it's explicitly against all actual and de facto policies, and even then they may not.

It doesn't matter when it comes to responsibility.

But if you want to judge them, then I think it's relevant. Because just about every company is susceptible to an errant employee causing damage in some way or other. So do we want to judge companies on their policies and overall damage rate and probability ("how likely am I to suffer this fate if I do business with them, and what is it likely to cost me?"), or on whether they won or lost the errant employee going viral lottery ("did a bad employee work for this company once and cause damage in a way that happened by chance to become very public")?

Bad employees are far rarer than bad management.

Employees don't go out of their way to steal from customers and give to the company, unless management pressures them to.

Yes it matters a lot! It's about plausibility. So very many security controls in industries where it actually matters, are about collusion. You can't completely prevent many types of fraud, but you can very significantly reduce it if it requires collusion.

It's the same here. If 1-2 people can make this happen, it's far more likely than if a chain of 10 people are needed to execute this kind of fraud.

I don't see the incentive - by the time Newegg is in damage control mode, they're not trying to save money [0]. And sending such a derelict board makes the situation that much worse. If anything, they would have swapped in a pristine new board to make it look like a legitimate sale.

I'm guessing this is a run of the mill "nobody's fault" failure of many people handling a small bit of the same situation, with their own poor incentives, leaving terse notes in the system, while nobody steps up to take ownership of the overall situation. The person receiving the board from Gigabyte didn't want to affect their metrics with the write off so they decided to put it back into inventory as open box. The person who inspected the RMA is trying to make metrics so they leave the shortest rejection note possible rather than noticing and investigating the Gigabyte RMA sticker. The CS rep on the phone cannot tell him anything more because there's literally nothing to tell besides what's displayed on their screen. etc.

Once you see this pattern, it's effectively everywhere these days. The other day I called a well-known brokerage company. I was transferred to the wrong department (like always), and the rep apologized while assuring me he would definitely get me to the right department (like always). My response was to casually tell him "no worries, I can ping-pong for a bit". Five departments later and I was finally in the right place. The people in the system don't even know how preposterous it looks from the outside.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30357038 . In the video linked here, Newegg stiffed someone on a $500 payment and then after it went viral suddenly offered them $1500, presumably so they'd keep quiet.

> they would have swapped in a pristine new board to make it look like a legitimate sale.

But then NewEgg would have admitted that NewEgg’s returns people lied about the motherboard being damaged. If only the returned motherboard had not had an RMA sticker on it, NewEgg could then have plausibly claimed that the returned damaged board was the same motherboard which was originally sold to GN, and blamed a mistake in inventory management, thereby admitting to a simple inventory mixup instead of admitting their returns people are scamming legitimate returns. But the sticker destroyed it; the sticker being there makes it both unlikely that it would have been sold to GN originally, but also makes it implausible that the returns people simply missed the huge sticker on the motherboard saying “From: Gigabyte; BROKEN CPU SOCKET”.

Miscommunication and mistakes don't rise to the level of deliberate "lying" - they would say "Our inspection tech made a mistake and thought there was thermal paste on the socket. We're sorry." and that would have explained the entire RMA situation. Then some blah blah about making it easier for customers to escalate to a manager, while not really reforming their processes.

Instead, this situation is much worse - they sold a known-broken refurbished-at-best motherboard as "open box" (fraud #1), and then rejected the return for fictitious reasons (fraud #2), likely because the RMA inspection tech saw that the motherboard was an unsellable piece of trash and had every incentive to make the customer eat it.

And I don't see how the Gigabyte sticker being there indicates it was not the board originally sent to GN. It's completely plausible that meets the requirements for "open box" at Newegg. And IIRC nowhere on the sticker does it say that the CPU socket is broken, rather that specific history was obtained by calling Gigabyte and asking.

> And I don't see how the Gigabyte sticker being there indicates it was not the board originally sent to GN. It's completely plausible that meets the requirements for "open box" at Newegg. And IIRC nowhere on the sticker does it say that the CPU socket is broken, rather that specific history was obtained by calling Gigabyte and asking.

First of all, it’s just my personal theory; the sticker being there does not prove anything. But the sticker does say¹:

DAMAGED BY USER CANNOT REPAIR

[x] CPU SOCKET DAMAGED

This makes me guess that it’s unlikely that this was the same motherboard which the returns people at NewEgg sometimes claimed “Thermal paste on motherboard” on, and sometimes claimed that GN caused the CPU socket damage.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CL-eB_Bv5Ik#t=7m38s

Ah, you're right about the sticker. I didn't zoom in on it when I first watched the video, so maybe his explanation skipped that or I misunderstood.

I think it's likely the RMA tech just ignored the sticker because they're used to seeing such stickers, if "open box" really is a free for all. The RMA tech's job isn't to look for reasons that something is Newegg's fault, but rather to look for reasons that it is the customer's fault. As such, a sticker that usually means the board was repaired by isn't something to note, but thermal paste is. And then once that note has been made, that's all the phone agent is going to ever see.

>and NewEgg picks a motherboard which is marked as damaged in their inventory system, and ships it to GN.

I imagine Newegg have a large inventory, but they would have to match the exact motherboard with the one Steve bought, and with some sort of CPU pin/socket damage. And the reason Steve accidentally bought an open box in the first place was due to the limited stock of that particular motherboard. So I'm not sure that this holds true.

>6. GN wants the motherboard returned, too.

Also I'm pretty sure Steve requested the motherboard back _before_ they then got the refund.

Steve just wanted his money or a working board.

They wouldn't have to match it, just pick one out of an RMA pile and damage it the way they described.

Or like, it was just a mistake? Hanlons razor.

A mistake happens once. When you refuse to correct that mistake and blame the other person, it is no longer a mistake, it is your stated position on the matter.

I have to agree that this timeline implies too much malice.

The null timeline of new egg just shipping an RMA'ed broken mobo in the first place seems more plausible to me.

The "This was customer damage" RMA rejection though I do not think applies. Hard to see any "honest mistake" there.

Applying Hanlon’s razor to profitable ‘mistakes’ is unwise.