The most shocking thing here is not the actions of that shady online store, but those of Citibank. The internet is full of assholes and cheaters. But Citibank should take better care of their customers. She should sue Citibank in small claims court and get her money back from there. Once the banks start losing money over this they will quickly yank the merchant accounts of the shady online shop and that will be that.
Also, while police do not care much about tales of repeated phone calls and harassment, they do care about counterfeiting (because congress makes them care). So she should report those guys to whichever FBI department deals with counterfeiting, and they might find themselves quickly in jail.
If this happened to me, there is NO WAY I would let my credit card company off. Also, I have disputed something in the past and I remember signing paperwork instead of just verbal acceptance/rejection of the charges. I wonder why that didn't happen here.
If this happened to me, there is NO WAY I would let my credit card company off. ... verbal acceptance/rejection of the charges
A very similar circumstance happened to me involving significantly less money. There are a few things I learned:
1) I have never seen a cardholder agreement that doesn't require all disputes to be done in writing.
2) This doesn't mean that the Customer Service Rep will tell you that in order to be fully compliant, you need to submit your claim in writing, nor does it mean that they will tell you anything other than "it's all set". If you're lucky, they might tell you that you should not pay the disputed portion of the bill.
It's not common sense because it's so rare to run into problems like this. Most people have never done a charge-back (I've done less than ten in my life and most were in the late 90s). It's incredibly important to research your terms when something like this arises and follow them carefully. For credit cards, the dispute process is usually written on the back of your statement.
Here's an example from a bill in my hand:
"If you think there is an error on your statement, write to us at:
<bank>
In your letter, give us the following information:
Account information...
Dollar amount...
Description of problem...
You must notify us of any potential errors in writing (their emphasis).
You may call us, but if you do not we are not required to investigate any potential errors and you may have to pay the amount in question." (I used the billing mistake section, but the charge-back section is basically the same with a few more restrictions and refers to this process in its writing).
The reporter did a disservice in not explaining where Ms. Rodriguez may have faltered in her dealing with Citibank and not providing a few tips for people running into this sort of jerk (or jerk-company-response). My personal tip, make copies of everything you send including the envelope and send it certified mail. If you still get jerked around by a large corporation and you don't have hopes of getting your story written up in the New York Times, send a letter outlining your problem with a detailed timeline to the same corporate address (or a more appropriate one if you can find it) and include a CC: line with whatever regulatory body oversees the industry in question ... along with your local and state representative. That netted me a triple refund (disputed amount was $45) after two months of getting nowhere.
Just bc your credit card agreement says something does not mean that that provision is enforceable under the laws of a given jurisdiction.
A huge percentage of contracts include clauses that are unenforceable, yet the provisions are included in the contract to give the credit card company any leverage it can get.
The threats from this guy and sheer fraud was the worst part. The fact that the people at citibank didn't care was frustrating just to read, I cant imagine how it would have been to experience it.
Prompted from this article I googled this guy's site, and I gave his 800 phone number a call and gave him a piece of my mind. He is basically a hustling piece of trash.
His number is (800) 995-9373, just ask for customer service...
This is completely nuts. I'm surprised that this company gets away (and actually be pretty successful) with it's predatorial behavior towards it's customers.
I searched for DecorMyEyes, and while the first result is the company itself, the rest of the page is filled with "My bad experience with DecorMyEyes" and "Consumer complaints against DecorMyEyes". Now I get that people are usually searching for the name of the company that makes the glasses (like Ciba Vision) and not DecorMyEyes, but doesn't one usually buy things online from fairly reputed sources (and you'd look up the company if you didn't know them)?
Never order anything from Brooklyn without a thorough background check. Seriously. I live here and it's a cottage industry: offer too good to be true prices, game shopping sites and search engines, post fake ratings and reviews, when enough people catch on start up under a new name. This guy seems to have taken it to a whole new level though.
See some photos of storefronts here (some are totally legit like B&H, but you see some of the photos and names and you get the picture)
Yep, I live here too (and not in Williamsburg but closer to Brighton Beach). Brooklyn is hustler's paradise. Some people I know do stuff online that will make this guy look like an amateur.
For those not from New York, I'll just point out that traditionally most of these problems have been associated with stores run by Hasidic jews. Although I'd imagine that many of the hipsters and other locals are just as bad if not worse.
That being said, don't buy a suspiciously cheap camera from a store that's closed on Saturday unless you've done your due diligence. And even then you're taking a risk.
Because a large percentage of the electronics stores selling grey market stuff out of Brooklyn are run by Hasidic jews. Obviously not all Hasidic jews selling cameras in Brooklyn are criminals, but it's generally easier just to avoid them. Similarly, just because I wouldn't pay $5000 for a Rolex on the streets of chinatown doesn't mean I'm racist against asians.
In general I have no evidence that Hasidic jews are any less ethical than any other group of people. At the same time there appears to be an ongoing problem of the ones in Brooklyn using their appearance of religiosity as a cover for committing crimes, especially related to selling stolen electronics and drug dealing. (Jesse Eisenberg was recently in a movie called Holy Rollers, which was about the latter problem.) Sure there are some people who are losing business due to being falsely stereotyped, but it's like 200 people as opposed to 200 million so the social consequences are fairly limited.
agreed. Years ago I bought a camera from just such a company and they called me claiming that I also needed to buy a special case to get that price. Very pushy and rude. But I had a coupon for a free case right from the manufacturer and the ad made no mention of such a requirement.
A more thorough investigation would have saved me the trouble. If you've never heard of a company, a significantly lower price from a high cost location is a definite warning sign.
The article has the quote "Mr. Borker described his business as fantastically profitable. At his home, that seems unlikely." and goes on to paint a dimmer picture of his prospects.
In the other thread about this article, I noted how this guy has the exact opposite of the Zappos customer service philosopy, and will likely end up reaping what he's sewn.
The sad thing is that many people don't look up a company they don't know. He's likely taking advantage of time-pressed or less savvy consumers.
He claims he sold $20,000 worth of product in 1 day, for a profit of $3,000. However, if he is sending fake product (like the women claims she received) profits may potentially be much higher.
Except that he has no product inhouse except for stacks of returns. He is merely having other companies dropship the product, which I doubt he has checked the condition of.
So basically, he is using a marginal gain strategy of reselling other companies' stuff.
Nofollow was a solution to spam on forums and comment pages (which didn't solve any problem for forums or blogs, since people spam nofollow ones regardless, but it solves a problem for search engines trying to decide which links on a blog were hand-placed with a minimum of work). It isn't obvious to me that everybody on the Internet should necessarily be up on current best practices for solving Google's problems, because most people do not put links into their web pages for the purpose of improving your link graph.
Nofollow was introduced in January 2005, so it's been around for a while. While the first wide-scale deployment was on blog comments and similar content management systems, it was always a general mechanism that Google respected. In fact, the very first nofollow links on the web were not placed on a blog or a forum. They were on my school home page. I put them there for testing in late 2004--they're still there, in fact.
In this instance, if someone is running a consumer complaint site that is going to be linking to a bunch of semi-scuzzy businesses, it's reasonable for that specific niche of sites to ask themselves whether they want to add rel=nofollow on the links to the businesses that are being complained about.
I suspect those using questionable SEO methods will always be one step ahead of algorithms, sure they take the risk of being identified and banned manually.
In this case a bit of user education would go a long way, I don't just buy off random sites without checking them up online or getting a recommendation from someone I know.
This submission has a far better title that's aligned with the typical HN interests. It mentions Google and getting a business advantage.
Having seen people submit stories here with awful headlines and then wonder why they didn't take off so many times, it no longer surprises me that most people can't write good titles..
Yet, I'd say you're being unfair to the person who made the original submission. That person didn't "write" the title. They used the same title that the newspaper story has.
On a bad day, writing your own title (as is the case for this submission) can get you angry comments from readers. (That said, I personally agree with you that sometimes it makes sense to write your own title instead of using the title used by the newspaper )
This makes sense; people do not write positive reviews because there is no incentive to do so. Negative reviews, though, you get to rant and be a savior, so you are more motivated to write them. More buzz == more links == more traffic.
What doesn't make sense, though, is that the banks don't care that their Cardholders are being abused intentionally. That can't be good for their business, so I'm surprised that they don't go after him. Physical threats and fake lawsuits also sound like things that will get you into trouble. I have a feeling that this "business model" is going to end with some time in prison, which makes it questionably useful long-term.
The article claims that Amazon doesn't put up with this bullshit; why does everyone else?
(I have half a mind to order some glasses from this guy just to get him to threaten to sue me. It will be fun to show up in court and serve him with my countersuit.)
If the New York Times had put a "nofollow" on the link to the guy's site, it would have been the ultimate subversive twist to the story. Not poetic justice ... NERD justice.
I just checked the source code, though, and there's no "nofollow."
Part of the problem is that [christian audigier glasses] is a difficult query. Why? Because most of the content on christianaudigier.com is about clothes. There's only a few pages about glasses, and even those pages don't seem to have the word "glasses" on them. Instead, they almost exclusively use the word "sunglasses." Here's the search results for [christian audigier sunglasses] for example:
As you can see, the official website has three of the top four results in that case. In essence, you're asking [brandname X] to return brandname.com when the word X doesn't actually appear anywhere on site. That's fundamentally a hard query. We have made progress on queries like that, and certainly folks at Google are talking about how to do better on such queries in the future.
Bravo Google! The google checkout button no longer leads to a checkout page, but rather "Unfortunately, this merchant no longer accepts payments through Google. We apologize for the inconvenience."
Perhaps a part of the overall solution (besides blaming search engines) is to better educate the average consumer about buying expensive goods from unfamiliar websites without first doing a little bit of research on their reputation.
You can still star results (which does the same as upvoting them). As far as I know, the only thing this has ever affected was your own search results.
The gist being that popularity algorithms (such as the supposedly deemphasized PageRank) typically fail to distinguish between good and bad references.
It's interesting that a search mentioned in the article, "Christian Audigier glasses," still shows DecorMyEyes near the top for Google. It's also near the top for Bing
It's nowhere to be seen in Duck Duck Go.
Bing seems to just be copying Google, both its good and bad results, which is disappointing. Given that everyone is optimizing for Google and not (as much) for Bing, it shouldn't be hard for Bing to do better.
I think it's actually pretty brilliant on NYT's part. They're forcing Google to fix the problem instead of working around it like Google has asked everyone else to do. This isn't Google's Internet; they don't get to tell us how to use it. It's their job to take what's there and index it in a useful way.
It may take a few years but I look forward to reading about him getting a prison sentence at some point.
He's obviously broken criminal, not just civil laws, they are just harder to prove. One would be identity theft by calling credit card companies as other people.
Seriously. The man has no fear of police, just connected people. That by itself just makes the country that it happens in look bad, even if there was no such thing as an internet.
This could have been a story about him gaming the Yellow Pages by getting 18 phone numbers and 18 business names in 18 sections, each name prefixed with 18 'a's.
All the internet assures is that his customers will get the product home before checking it for quality, and that the customers are less likely to be local - but that doesn't seem to intimidate him in the least.
Not that the story doesn't highlight a serious flaw in google's search, but that's the least of the story for me.
I thought this, at the end of the article, was telling:
"The customer is always right - not here, you understand?" he says, raising his voice. "I hate that phrase - the customer is always right. Why is the merchant always wrong? Can the customer ever be wrong? Is that not possible?"
I suspect (hope) that such a lack of imagination will ultimately curb his success. You don't treat your customers well purely for your customers' benefit...
His behaviour is atrocious. I cannot imagine that I would be very happy about him doing this to someone for whom I cared. If his location is easily findable, I am amazed that no-one has enthusiastically gone to address his behaviour in person, especially given that the 'authorities' don't seem to care.
The right starting date is 1993. Because that is when the first commercial online site came online. However that company got sold to AOL in 1995. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Network_Navigator for details.
The second company to try to make money on the web was Netscape. It was founded in 1994, however its IPO was in 1995. So that is two reasons why 1995 is important at the beginning of online commerce.
If he's actually sending images from Google earth through email, he's guilty of copyright infringement, deserving of both civil and criminal penalties.
You know, there is actually something WE can do. Yeah, we. It would be easy to setup DecorMyEyesScams.tld and google bomb it to the top of google's SERPs.
There are other ways. One could, for example, report the sites - there are atleast two sites that are owned by the same jerk according to various sources - to Google, Phishtank or Netcraft.
After spending a little time in the... darker side of computer security when I was younger all I can say is that there's certainly something to be done and it's a tad more direct than Google bombing. This guys pretty lucky he hasn't angered anyone important because he's pretty low on the scumbag scale.
If this had happened to me it would have actually been enough to make him my new favorite target. Judging by a quick purview of the source of his page it probably wouldn't have ended up pretty well for him either.
No, this case is an argument for a focus on natural language processing and sentiment analysis. The Google way would never involve manual curation, and we'll get some cool NLP research out of it.
I would think that adding a dose of sentiment analysis to their algorithm wouldn't be that hard. You could have a database of positive/negative terms and use it to score web pages for positive/negative content. It might not be very accurate but it seems like it could at least be used to make sure that sites with lots of negative link parents don't make it to the top of the page.
I agree, It would be very cool to see some breakthroughs in AI from Google.
But what I meant was that some sort of an editorial process would help in these situations, and the people that usually get up in arms about organic results and anti-trust should accept that this falls under first amendment rights and can be very useful in improving results.
Also, while police do not care much about tales of repeated phone calls and harassment, they do care about counterfeiting (because congress makes them care). So she should report those guys to whichever FBI department deals with counterfeiting, and they might find themselves quickly in jail.