I just got my package of new earphones from Best Buy, and the box was fucking empty. I mean there is the box and instruction manuals and charging cable, but the actual earphones aren’t there. They’ve used Shipt (which is like a doordash but for packages) but the box was inside another layer of packaging which was supposedly sealed before the delivery person got it so I’m leaning towards it being store employee theft, or someone returned an empty box and the employees didn’t verify it.

I’ll be contacting Bestbuy and Credit Card issuer as soon as customer support hours start.

I’ve literally never lost a package, I’m just so, annoyed. The money will probably be back, but like dude I just wanna listen to some music. Ugh… I guess phone speakers will have to do for now.

PSA: Record a video when opening packages just in case you need to file a dispute. I didn’t but I don’t think there’s gonna be an issue since these things rarely happen to me and disputes are rarely filed.

So have you ever been defrauded?

  • I’ve had FedEx deliver my package to a vacant neighborhood home. By the time I went to get the package, it was gone. FedEx did a “thorough” investigation and found that they delivered it correctly. I appealed and never got my money back.

  • my partner, her friend and I traveled to another city 4 hours away to go see a musical. my partner found the accomodation on booking.com

    when we got to where the apartment should be, we couldn’t find it. we looked around for ages to no avail. found a police station nearby. we asked them if they knew of the address. they pointed to the building across the street they said had been abandoned for 5 years. when we tried to call the host it went thru to an international phoneline in a different language.

    oof

  • On my wedding night, one of my vendors decided to go on a shopping spree with my credit card. I guess he hoped that there would be so many charges that I wouldn’t notice. I didn’t remember shopping for car parts while I was saying “I do”. Credit card refunded the charges. I actually got them the address that the purchases were shipped to but they didn’t care.

  •  yads   ( @yads@lemmy.ca ) 
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    51 year ago

    About 20 years ago I spent about $2k on a piece of electronic music gear on eBay. I was just out of university and this was a huge sum for me. It soon turned out that it was a fraudulent listing. This guy had gotten access to his girlfriend’s eBay account and posted a bunch of high value auctions and stole the money. A bunch of us victims were in touch and commiserating about our bad fortune. However, this story has a happy ending. The police got involved and were able to recover the money!

  • Yeah. Had the time-card printout showing four hours of overtime. No overtime on my paycheque. Like an idiot, I gave my manager the printout so he could “investigate”. Yeah, never got paid for those four hours.

    • My advice is, always keep the original and give your employer the copy of any evidence. Only give the original to a court when it gets to a legal proceeding. (Even then, you still keep an extra copy for yourself. Courts don’t typically lose evidence, but an extra copy doesn’t hurt.)

  • Been the victim of fraud. Unfortunately - yes.
    When I was younger and Chip ‘n’ PIN was becoming popular, many smaller shops had a Paypoint machine that would print the entire card number and CCV on the receipt. I was so paranoid about fraud, especially given that there was sufficient information printed on the receipt that anyone could do an Amazon order with those details. I used to get a black permanent marker and scribble the details out before putting the receipt in the bin.

    Imagine my horror when a decade later, I learn that I have been the victim of fraud, and a type of fraud it was entirely impossible for me to prevent. In the UK fraudsters watch for new companies popping up on Companies House and then use the details to go on a shopping spree. The way it works is like this:

    They see my name, address and date of birth on the website. They are looking for a name that matches their surname and first initial. So for me that could be Alexander Jones for example. They go to a retail park and pop into Argos. They order several thousand pounds of stuff. When they go to pay, the person at the counter helpfully asks “Do you have an Argos credit card? If you apply for one today, we’ll transfer the balance of today’s purchases to the card” and armed with my address, date of birth and name, and a card that already has the same surname and first initial as me - they are accepted for an Argos credit card. Post nothing for the goods they just bought and leave the store. They go next door to JJB sports, and then whole process repeats. “Do you have a JJB sports card? If you get one today…”

    They visited 6 stores in an hour and repeated this process at all of them. And a week later I start receiving credit cards…

    It’s a surprisingly common scam (or it was), brought on entirely by the shops bring pushed to get people to sign up for credit cards…

    I had to be on a register for several years, so if anyone tried to open an account or take out credit in my name, I would get a phone call to check if it was actually me.

    • Why in the world are you allowed to take out credit cards for so little information? In the US you _must _ give a social security number and then a credit check is done. It happens all at the register and can take a few minutes. You don’t just get automatically approved.

  • This is why we always use a credit card to purchase anything, right?

    Post office: box was sliced and someone stuck their hand in and removed contents and successfully reclosed. We learned: 1. do not bring attention to your box

    • We learned: 1. do not bring attention to your box (stickers and cute doodles? = Fun stuff inside) 2. Insure your boxes and contents 3. Never send anything irreplaceable, like family heirlooms 4. Use those boring, same as every other Flat Rate boxes as much as possible.

  • A couple of years ago, I was a Canadian travelling in Silicon Valley. I hadn’t yet acquired any USD but was hungry and went to a mall food court. I was surprised when they wouldn’t accept Apple Pay. This place was not far from Cupertino (Apple headquarters). They didn’t even use chip-and-pin, which is ubiquitous in Canada and even everywhere I’ve been in Mexico. Instead, they swiped the magnetic strip and made my sign a screen with a stylus.

    Well, next thing you know, I’m getting fraudulent charges on my card from Las Vegas. I immediately called the bank and they locked it down. Fortunately, I had another card on me but was super paranoid to use it after that.

  • My first time was a long time ago at CompUSA (RIP). I purchased a joystick (like for flight sims) took it home, and found only the heavy power brick in the box. It took me at least 45 minutes of arguing at the store to get them to give me a replacement. Eventually I had to get a new box from their shelf and show them there was no plastic tape seal thing on new boxes to demonstrate that mine likely didn’t have one when I bought it either.

    I’ve also had brand name micro SD cards from Amazon several years ago when things had just started to go down hill there. They had their capacity faked despite the packaging and seller looking legitimate. It may have been when they had “fulfilled by amazon” meant Amazon just treated all stock like Amazon’s general stock. If I sold a widget via Amazon stored in a Chicago warehouse and a fraud sold the same widget stored in a warehouse in NY, a NYC customer could order the widget from my store page and Amazon would just ship the one in NY because it was closer to the buyer and cheaper for Amazon to ship. I’d get a fraud complaint even though it wasn’t my product that was fraudulent.

    Maybe 5-10 years ago someone used my credit card number, in a shopping center I frequent, to make a bunch of purchases at stores I’ve never visited (women’s fashion accessories). I reported this to my credit card company and they removed the charges without any complaint. I guess they managed to get the card info and my zip from a data leak and figured purchases in my zip code would be less likely to be flagged.

    I’ve sure there may have been a few times where I was none the wiser.