Friday 26 May 2017

FFS Friday - Too Good to be True

Last week Tiger was all excited because he'd found a deal where we could get 7 nights in Phuket for $298.

Being me I was very sceptical about it.

The company were ringing him up and wanting him to make a decision straight away. 

That always rings bells for me. Anyone who is pushing for a decision is usually not someone that I want to deal with. 

Tiger was insisting that it was a legit deal and itching to book it.

I asked him to google the company before paying anything.

They wanted payment via paypal over the phone and then a receipt number given to them.

Doesn't sound great does it?

I asked Tiger if he thought it was a legit deal and he said he thought it was too good to be true.

That answered the question for me and I assumed he wouldn't go through with it.

He did. 

I'm not joking.

Once I realised he'd done the deal I googled the company. Whilst they were a legit Australian business, they had 1 star reviews. Great.

It also turned out they were a timeshare company and expected us to sit through an hour long presentation, which they had forgotten to tell us.

I showed Tiger the reviews, he read some more reviews on other sites, then called them to get our money back.

They refused.

I got angry and told Tiger to tell them that one way or another we'd be getting our money back. 

The guy wanted to talk to me and tried to convince me they weren't dodgy. It didn't work. I yelled at him for a while (never mess with a tired, sick Mum who has had very little sleep thanks to two sick children, whilst also having gastro. Bad idea dodgy time share man.)

He still refused to refund our money so I lodged a PayPal dispute, called the bank and cancelled our credit card.

Tiger called them again, told them that his brother would be visiting them to ensure we got our money back (their office is in the same place where BIL lives) and they assured us that we'd have our money back within three days. 

Fifteen minutes later I got an email from PayPal saying my dispute case had been closed as my money had been refunded. Yay!

Unfortunately I'd already cancelled our credit card.

Saturday afternoon I went shopping, tried to use our savings account and I couldn't. 

The bank had failed to tell me that when we cancelled our credit card, it would also mean that we had no access to our savings account (our savings account is linked to our credit card so we use the credit card to access our savings).

Thankfully I had enough cash on me to pay for my shopping and we stayed home on the Sunday.

The bank told us we'd have our new cards within three days. I'd asked for them to be sent to my PO Box. Every day we checked the PO Box.

They arrived to our home address four days later. 

Ah well. There's a lesson to be learned. Two in fact.

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. 

Secondly, don't try to reason with a tired, sick and grumpy parent, you won't win. 

 

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