… but I paid by paypal. Any chance of a refund, or am I screwed?

I bought a DVD boxset that came up as cheapest on a google shopping search from apparently bogus dvd seller At the time I had a slightly funny feeling about it, but I’m a sucker for a bargain (not that much of a bargain; £50ish vs £70ish on amazon) and I thought ‘S’okay, paypal protects against that sort of thing’.

However, I’ve started a dispute on paypal, which I immediately had to upgrade to a claim because paypal informs me that my ‘seller cannot respond right now’. it then said they would ‘try to recover a refund’

Bugger. I thought that paypal would drag the money back one way or another? Seems not as safe as I thought…

They generally take about 7 days to get back to you, I’ve recently done a PP claim and it went pretty much the same, got an email from them about 3-4 days later telling me that I’ve been refunded.

Oh dear best of luck getting it back, might be worth contacting Go Daddy about their client.

Result of WHOIS query:

Domain name:
cheapdvdstore.co.uk

Registrant:
RC Godaddy

Registrant type:
Unknown

Registrant’s address:
dgsdfg
dfgdf
beijing
100001
China

Registrar:
GoDaddy.com, LLP. [Tag = GODADDY]

Drac, I’m sure you are right, but unfortunately I have very little idea what you are on about. Who is this go daddy? Some kind of interweb landlord?

GoDaddy is deadlydarcy’s forum name on the fetish sites.

And only because StopDaddy was already registered.

http://www.godaddy.com/

Provide domain names and hosting, they may be hosted with them so they’ll be interested to hear it’s being misused.

Also contact Google – they will remove them from their shopping searches.

http://support.google.com/merchants/bin/request.py?contact_type=policy

Hey Drac,

Good call on submitting the site to Go Daddy. I passed it on to our Fraud Department, and they will take care of it if they find anything. It also looks like the hosting for the site has been shut down. In the future, you can submit sites like this directly to fraud@godaddy.com for review.

Good biking!

The mighty power of STW makes itself felt again 🙂

Cheers gabegodaddy that was some speedy work.

Just shows how many hits the places gets.

Update:
Sooo, suprisingly, the site owner got in touch, saying they were sorry and had never had this before (yeah right). and offered a partial refund of £15. I told them politely that this was not good enough, and a full refund is the only acceptable solution. Paypal have now ‘found’ in my favour, but require me to return the DVDs to china via a tracked service, which is going to cost a packet, and make it hardly worth the effort. Also, I’m really not happy with the legalities of returning counterfeit goods, surely they should be destroyed?

Any advice would be welcome.

Surely they should cover the costs of having to send the DVD’s back? It’s not your fault so I would have thought Paypal would ensure that the seller also refunds the costs?

Then again I don’t know so could be entirely wrong 😀

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
“(1)A person commits an offence who, without the licence of the copyright owner—
(a to f edited out)
(e)distributes otherwise than in the course of a business to such an extent as to affect prejudicially the owner of the copyright,
an article which is, and which he knows or has reason to believe is, an infringing copy of a copyright work.”

So paypal want you to commit an offence??

I would suggest to paypal that you should get a full refund and destroy the disks . FACT may well offer you some guidance.

Teadrinker, that’s what I would think too. However, PayPal seem to have different ideas, and I’m not sure where to go from here. Maybe, as they sent me fake goods, I should send them back a post it note saying ‘I am a DVD box set’ play them at there own game. Grrr.

I agree crankboy, and thanks for the quote, i shall use it. But communicating with PayPal is proving to be challenging; the only options I’m given at this stage are cancel claim or return goods.

Think back to WHSmith not overseeing their DVD sources too carefully. During a couple year period where their supplier was getting DVD’s cheap from an unnamed source, it’s estimated 25-50% of the DVD’s they stocked in their stores were fake. Me and a mate used to buy ours there due to prices at the time and we used to have discussions regularly about the quality of the DVD’s and the quality of the encoding, which we now know to be bad ripping with inferior codecs and lower bitrates.

Invite the paypal user to collect the goods at their expense; or if they prefer you can arrange the shipment on their DHL / FedEx (etc) account – all you will need is their account number.

“Think back to WHSmith not overseeing their DVD sources too carefully. During a couple year period where their supplier was getting DVD’s cheap from an unnamed source, it’s estimated 25-50% of the DVD’s they stocked in their stores were fake. Me and a mate used to buy ours there due to prices at the time and we used to have discussions regularly about the quality of the DVD’s and the quality of the encoding, which we now know to be bad ripping with inferior codecs and lower bitrates.”

When?

Which supplier? EUK, Igloo or THE?