I bought an (allegedly) 4-gig Ipod lookalike for my brother-in-law's birthday... my wife liked it so much that I got one for her as well - she got one with a 2" screen. The "MP3 Player Utils" CD that came with the gadget was so old that it was almost impossible to convert avi files to the right dimensions, so I looked around for a more recent version, and asked friends (on a technical support forum) for advice. That's when I discovered about "
The Great Chipod Scam"... and that I was a victim of it. Could be worse: Coolstuff Online "recommend" delivery insurance... but it turns out to be compulsory - so at least I GOT the damned players (even of I had to pay extra) And they
both turn out to be 2 gigabyte units hacked to give the appearance of holding 4 gigabytes. A quick study of the online petition (I'm signatory 543!) shows Coolstuff's name cropping up repeatedly - ALWAYS with the same complaint: "I paid for a 4 gig player, they delivered a hacked 2 gigabyte unit".
I wrote to them, made a formal complaint to EBay, and got exactly the same reply as shown elsewhere in this forum:
Quote:
This mp4 is combined with 2 pcs. 2GB nano flash and one of the nano flash may have improper format or reset (disk error) by vibration during the delivery. So, you can return to us with full refund or we give you partial refund GBP6.00 for the resulted 2GB. Please confirm if it is OK. Then we will send you the refund.
We will also leave you good feedback. Thanks a lot.
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I replied:
Quote:
It's strange how this problem KEEPS ON happening: your name can be found at http://www.petitiononline.com/eBay666/ a number of times - always with the same complaint: "I ordered a 4 gig player, they delivered a 2 Gig one". Strange also how "vibration" caused the player to become "hacked" so that it would mis-report the amount of Memory supplied. Please... I've been in tech support for both computers and mobile phones for over 10 years. And I've read the crap with which you've tried to fob-off other scammed customers. You are NOT fooling me with this rubbish: You hacked the memory (or paid to have it hacked) and you KNOW that the units you sell as "4 Gigabytes" are really only 2. You must also be aware that it's illegal to try and import radios into China. If I ship back the unit, it'll be impounded.
You behaved fraudulently... you got caught. Your first lie is implausible. Try a BETTER offer than £6.
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EBay aren't going to do anything - why would they? They're "on a nice little earner", getting a percentage of the inflated price of each hacked player sold. SO can WE - the public - do anything? Only if we're prepared to make some kind of effort - even a slight one. For example, the Ebay system allows anyone to contact the (currently) winning bidder in any auction. There are hundreds of us who have been scammed: what if we each donated an hour of our time to contacting the winners of
ongoing auctions and warned them that they were buying from a known fraudster who was probably going to supply inferior goods (with a link to this - and other similar - sites) If we could just upset commerce for ONE DAY, it would almost certainly put the fear of God into the scammers: What we did once, we could do
again. If almost every transaction resulted in the purchasers looking very closely at what was being delivered to them BEFORE giving feedback... AND if every purchaser KNEW about the scam. then the vendors would be deluged with queries, complaints...and they
wouldn't simply be getting away with it.