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.
So it's not that surprising that they allow it on their platform.
This is also a reminder it's good that I don't give my phone number to anyone on ebay.
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.
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.
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.
But generally, frequent customers at any shop, get better service.
Then again, there is costco too. That is a paid membership for support.
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.
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.
You're a "little guy". You're not "business", "landlord", or government".. So your actual rights don't matter.
Put it differently, the very pigs who are hired to do "law and order" explicitly told you that your rights don't matter.
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.