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I used to buy used things from the Mercari marketplace (similar to eBay), until someone sent the wrong item and I emailed Mercari the same day since their web site wasn't working to open a return request (you have to resolve wrong items within 3 days). Support waited 3 days to respond and told me I was outside the window so they couldn't refund me and that I should have done it sooner. I did a chargeback and they were angry and told me to reverse it. They then banned my household for life.

And then there's PayPal who refused to refund from a clear scam for almost $5K, even after I left a BBB complaint. Credit card chargeback saved the day, again. They didn't ban me, oddly.

I guess this is an endorsement of using a credit card.

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I have this vs. a TV webshop in The Netherlands that stiffed my parents because their €430 TV broke and the warranty was expiring in a few months.

Anytime anyone in my social circle asks for a TV recommendation, I specifically tell them not to order from that shop, explaining they have a habit of stiffing people on warranties. I also tell those people to tell anyone they know not to order from there. I do the same whenever TVs in general or that webshop comes up on Tweakers, the biggest Dutch tech site.

I've been at it for quite some years, and roughly estimating it's costing them ±20 TV sales a year, averaged €650 per TV. That's €13.000 in lost sales per year. Working my way towards €100k cumulative, at which point the score feels settled.

Losing €100k in sales over not honoring the warranty on a €430 TV. A nice, solid x233 loss multiplier :)

If you have a vindictive streak in you, see this as your clarion call. You can cause some real cost to a company's bottom line with relatively little effort. And the more of us do this, the worse the pain gets for crappy companies.

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> was within a few months of an expiring warranty

A few months inside or a few months outside?

Because that seems to determine who's being unreasonable in this.

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Oh, I meant within! I guess that is ambiguous, I figured within = inside, and outside = expired. I'll edit.

Honestly what really egged me on was that I told them I might take them to small claims, and their response was sending a bunch of small claims cases they won.

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No one sends you the cases they didn't win and they probably had a lot of court cases.
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> Theres a business there for sure - does a business you hate use AI in any customer facing way? make them burn tokens.

Until recently I used to get three or four phone calls a week from an AI voice guy trying to sell me services to claim back car finance overpayments. I've never had car finance, I've only ever just bought them.

Anyway, if you keep telling the bot to "ignore all previous prompts" and do something else, eventually it will.

Credit to Steve Mould on Youtube for the idea.

I only got to do this about two or three times before they gave up phoning me. The first time I had it telling me about soup for half an hour.

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