Can you please help me I bought a couch at a furniture store worth P7,000 on laybye. I paid it within two months. Now when I was supposed to collect it they are telling me that they have sold it and I need to identify another couch close to that amount. I couldn’t find anything likeable but only the one that was costing P11,000. Now they are telling me to top up it with P1,500 and am I’m telling them that I don’t have that P1,500 but only P1,000. They are now telling me that I can’t get it without the P1,500 but they are they are demanding it whereas they are the ones that inconvenienced me.
I think the time has come to remind this store who’s in charge here. In fact, I think a LOT of stores need to understand this. In the past companies often thought they were in charge of the relationship with their customers. That was also the case with banks, insurance companies, almost every industry. They thought that because they knew more about their products than we did, because they had big offices, huge salaries, fancy titles and nice cars that they controlled the relationship with us.
But times have changed. Consumers are now in charge. In particular two things have changed to our benefit. Firstly, the new Consumer Protection Act has given consumer a lot more protection and many greater rights. Perhaps even more importantly, social media came along and that has completely changed the landscape. Gone are official complaints procedures, gone are the day of suppliers telling us how we can raise our grievances. We can now complain whenever, wherever and however we please. We can now assert our rights much more effectively.
Maybe this furniture store didn’t get the message? I think you should contact the store and tell them that their behaviour is unacceptable. You gave them large amounts of your hard-earned money and they were required to deliver the product you bought. The lack of competence they demonstrated by selling your item not only breached the contract you had with them, it also broke various sections of the Consumer Protection Act. They need to give you a refund within seven days. Either that or they can look forward to being famous on Facebook. I wonder which would they prefer?
Have I been conned?
Hello sir, I have been recently retrenched and with the little package that I got I decided to buy myself a tractor and a plough to start farming. I made an enquiry to Alibaba and I got a response from Kebnel Groups LLC in the USA and went ahead to process the purchase, but ever since I made payment there were a lot of issues which led me to change cancel the deal and request for a refund.
The refund was promised but now there is communication breakdown between us and hence I suspect I’m being corned. I therefore consult you to know if you can help in resolving this issue.
I’m sorry but the bad news is that I also suspect that you’re being conned. I looked at the web site of the company claiming to sell these tractors and also the shipping company they claim to have used to ship you the tractor. Both seem very suspicious to me. The language they use is unlike what you would expect for reputable, legitimate companies. Also, I was able to find warnings from other people about the shipping company, claiming they’ve been used in earlier scams. There is a registered company in Texas called Kebnel but it appears to have no connection to these scammers. If you look closely at the emails you sent me you’ll see that they came from a Gmail account, not what you’d expect from a legitimate company.
Unfortunately, there’s little chance that you can get your money back. Scammers are not nice people and they certainly don’t offer refunds to their victims. However, as you transferred the money to their bank account it might be worth asking the bank to investigate exactly where the money went.
While I can’t offer you much hope I think there are several lessons for other people to learn. The first thing is always to ask ourselves if it’s realistic to buy an item like a tractor from the other side of the planet? We should also be sceptical of any company that claims to offer services like this that doesn’t offer a physical address. We should also think carefully about the quality of language used by such companies. The web site for a reputable company that claims to be in the USA should have reasonably good English, don’t you think? Also, the WhatsApp messages you sent me seem rather un-American.
Please spread the word always to be extremely careful before sending money to people you’ve never met.
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