Sometimes I don't have the time to do my own submissions but this time I was just lured by the fact that 1500 submissions to free directories would only cost me $20 ; This $20 would save me lots of time so I could focus on other stuff that I had neglected recently ... the deal was spotted on DP and there was no way I would miss it.
The story
The thread was created by TheZer0Group and was new (5-10 posts), so I thought to myself that the guy is a new kid on the block so he is offering this nice deal in order to get some customers that will leave a good comment on the thread. So without wasting any time I send the money and the details of my submission. The thread started to gather some questions from potential buyers but the answers coming to think about it did seem professional answers but I did not suspect anything at the time.
The story continues with one day passing and no sign of any submission emails from any free directory. I usually setup email filters on gmail for each submission that I do so I can easily spot the progress at any time; and so I did for this project. The next day I send the guy a reminder PM that I did not see anything and he confirmed that my submission order was next in line ... actually an hour later I did receive about 7-8 email confirmations refering to the submission in question ... so this together with the fact in the thread it was mentioned that the orders will not be done all at one shot help me rest assured that everything was going OK.
Next day I did not receive any email confirmations so I decided to send him a second reminder that read that if he did not intend to do any more submissions he should refund my money. Without answering my PM he probably did a few submissions more, since later on I did receive a few confirmations of submission. I was assured again that maybe I had mistaken the guy for a fake.
The following two days I did not see any confirmation action in my email and I send a couple of reminders by PM to theZeroGroup ... but I was too busy running other choirs to notice that I did not receive any answer. The fifth day though, I was sure that there was not going to be any more submissions and that I had probably lost $20.
I posted a message on the thread asking if other customers had there orders completed and people started slowly realizing that this was a scam.
Disputing the service on Paypal
My immediate reaction was to start a dispute on paypal and see if I could get a refund from that scum of a person. On the paypal dispute form mentioned that the service was incomplete and chose the category to be services, and added as reference the thread in DP and mentioned that I did try to get in contact with this person but without any success ...
A few minutes later I did receive what seems like an automated response
Our investigation into your claim is complete. As stated in our User Agreement, the claims process only applies to the shipment of goods. It does not apply to complaints about the attributes or quality of goods received. Therefore, we are unable to reverse this transaction or issue a refund.So no refund for quality of goods received, that is what a bad service amounts to.
The moral of the story
If it sounds too good to be true it probably is (as ishan mentioned on the thread). One more thing I learned from this is paypal does protect the seller of services and we should be aware of this when paying for services through paypal.
I should close this by saying that the details of this person (as paypal has them recorded) are:
Name: William Jones (unverified)
Email: williamindia @ safe-mail.net
I doubt that he uses this email in general and I doubt that this is his name. But who knows maybe someone knows a little something about this person ... or maybe he tries to pull this off again under the same personal details ...
