Sometimes it's too much hassle to do the right thing

[Baby Fawkes]

Minor rant here about how annoying some companies make it to just do the right thing and be honest. Going through this made me think of the thread about the recliner chairs with Amazon that midjd had.

I've used LivingSocial for a quite a number of vouchers in the past and never really had a problem. Most of the time it has always been for smaller priced items around $20-$50 or so. At the end of last year my wife and I decided that we want to get PRK eye surgery done, so we were doing research on places and keeping an eye out for any offers. Turns out that a local company with a good reputation had a coupon available on Amazon Local and LivingSocial. DW purchased the offer from Amazon Local and I was going to do the same, but I missed the fact that it expired that day. Nevermind though, I went with the LivingSocial coupon. The coupons were $2995 for each one, so the same price on whichever site we used.

(Tangent: DW has since had the surgery and it has been great. I got to watch it happen and was very impressed with how simple and quick it is.)

Anyway, I have my surgery scheduled for the beginning on May and I had printouts of the coupons. Last weekend I checked my credit card statement and found out that LivingSocial had refunded me 5 of the last coupons that I had purchased. This included the $2995 for the eye surgery as well as 4 other coupons that were more expensive than normal. The other 4 averages about $70 each for various services. In total they refunded about $3300 or purchases. The thing is, the only coupon that I had actually used yet was the large eye surgery one. The other coupons for about $280 had all been used at the merchants, but the merchants obviously hadn't redeemed them yet.

I was concerned that the merchants were going to somehow going to get screwed by this and I was more than happy to pay the coupon prices so I logged into my account and saw that I had no history or purchases or vouchers in my account. Then I tried to phone LivingSocial about it. They asked me for the coupon numbers and they couldn't locate any of the 5 in their system. It seemed as if the coupons had been deleted and the system automatically refunded them to the credit card that they were purchased with so I got all my money back. They said they would look into it and get back to me about the issue.

Roll on Monday and I get an email from someone called Kimberly who claims to be from the fraud department at LivingSocial telling me that my account was frozen due to suspected fraudulent activity. For all I know they may have deemed the $2995 charge to be suspicious, kind of like a credit card company seeing unusual activity. The email went on to tell me that to resolve the issue I need to fax copies of my credit statements to the specified fax number for all the vouchers I have previously purchased from them to prove it was me. Uh, hang on... I'm not just going to blindly send copies of all my credit card statements to some random fax number. Besides, I'm not going to give them those copies under any circumstance. Surely, there has to be a different way to verify that it was me.

Anyway, I'm still in the mood to try and make sure that their merchants don't get screwed when they attempt to redeem the coupons worth $280 and find that the vouchers don't exist anymore, so I phone them back. I asked to speak to someone in the Fraud department to find out if the email was actually legit and not some phishing attempt, but they tell me that they can't put me through to the fraud department. Then I mention that I'm not going to just blindly send my credit card statements to a random number, so they advise me to reply to the email that I received explaining that and Kimberly from the department will work with me to find a more acceptable solution. Off I go and write a reply to the email.... hit send... and immediately get a response saying that I replied to a non-monitored email account at LivingSocial and that in order to help people resolve issues quicker they only provide customer support over the phone   . So then I decide to try once more and I pick up the phone to chat to them. The initially tell me the exact same thing, but when I explain that the email address is non-monitored they offer to speak with a supervisor. When they get on the line they mention that the business rules in place for fraud issues require that they won't take further discussions on the issue until they verify the credit card statements and therefore set it up so they don't get the email responses. If I want to get the issues resolved I have to follow the instructions in the email and send them my credit card statements before it will move along.

At this point I just tell them that the ball is in their court and I won't bother contacting them again unless they reach out to me via phone to at least explain why they even believe that there was fraudulent activity on the account. They tell me that it's not normal policy and they can leave a note on the file, but they doubt that anyone will reach out to me on the phone. Their primary focus is to protect their customers and merchants. This is even after explaining that it appears that I was the one who brought it to attention and that I don't have any real incentive to push the issue. It's their merchants that they are trying to protect that are going to run into issues. I'm $280 better off right now so I'm not going to continue to push the issue if they are making it this difficult.

The other bonus is that I phoned the eye doctor and explained the situation and they agreed to match the coupon price for me rather than go out to Groupon and purchase the same thing again. They have my cost in the system because I showed them the coupon when I turned up as a new patient, so they'll honor that now. They're happy for me to pay them directly because now they don't have to give LivingSocial their cut off the top either.

All in all a win-win for me and I'm fine just walking away as morally I tried to do the right thing. 

[Baby Fawkes]

Needless to say, I'm not going to be using LivingSocial in the future. Nevermind the fact that this experience has turned me off them, my account is completely frozen so I couldn't make a purchase even if I wanted to. I'll happily send all future spending to Amazon Local or Groupon. 

[milee]

I feel your pain.

In June 2014, my son had to have a custom back brace. Since then, we've been waiting on the bill.  Last week, a one line "statement" for several thousand dollars was sent from the Ortho center.  I logged on to my health insurance website and saw that it was processed and the contracted amounts were adjusted, but the EOB on the health insurance website showed 5 lines of charges and only some numeric codes, so there was no way to tell exactly what services were billed for.

I called the Ortho center to ask for an itemized bill or invoice. Left a message that I was ready to pay, just needed to see what the charges were. Four days after I left the message, I get a call back from someone who is really nasty and sounds like one of those high pressure collection people who try to collect on zombie debt. She starts off the call without even greeting me, responding to the direct question I left on the message or asking me what I needed. Instead, she launches into an explanation of how the insurance company originally paid this but then recouped the money since it should have been paid by me out of my deductible so I owed it immediately or I'd be sent to collections. She seemed to think I was questioning if I owed them any money at all and was acting like I was fighting paying or didn't understand how a deductible worked.

So I stopped her and explained that I understood how a deductible works and was ready to pay the bill right then, just wanted to review the bill to make sure it was for the services we received. All I needed was a copy of the invoice/bill detail with some descriptions in English since there were only numeric codes on what I saw.  She didn't seem to understand why I'd need this and started saying that she was going to send me to collections immediately and that it was dishonest that my son had been wearing his "custom orthotic shoe inserts" for the past 9 months without paying for them.

So I stopped her again and explained that we never received any custom orthotic shoe inserts - only a back brace - and that was exactly why it's a good idea for people to review their bill detail before paying for it. I asked why my bill contained charges for shoe inserts. She then backed up and said she didn't have access to that level of detail, only the total owed, and we should pay immediately.

At that point, I asked to talk to a supervisor and she hung up on me.

So here's a company that has a customer that's willing to immediately pay them several thousand dollars. All they have to do is read me the detail of what the charges were for or send a copy of the bill/invoice (not a "statement" that just shows a total with no explanation). And they are treating me like a deadbeat. Sigh.

(I did eventually get through to a supervisor, who pulled up a copy of the bill, read me the charges - which were reasonable and described the services we received - and I paid them.)

[Bonny]

Can you still access their site and download/print offers? They may still be useful as a way to directly negotiate deals with service providers.

There may be a silver lining in this somewhere!  

[Baby Fawkes]

Mar 27, 2015 10:03:30 GMT -5 Bonny said:

Can you still access their site and download/print offers? They may still be useful as a way to directly negotiate deals with service providers.

There may be a silver lining in this somewhere!  

There really isn't a downside to any of this from my point of view. The only downside is a moral / ethical dilema, but I'm comfortable with the fact that I have tried to correct it and pay back the amount that was accidentally refunded for stuff I've already used, but they seem to be making it almost impossible for me to do that. 

I can't access any of the coupons that I've previously purchased. They've locked all purchase history etc from my account. For new offers I've never come across one that I purchased that wasn't available on either Groupon, Amazon Local or both, so I don't expect to lose out on this in any way. There was only 1 outstanding coupon that I hadn't  actually redeemed for services and that is the eye surgery. They are already going to match the price anyway. The other 4 coupons are in the hands of the merchants. I've already received the services for the coupons, but the merchant had got around to redeeming them yet for money. If I really want a coupon in the future that is not available on the competitor sites I can just get my wife to buy it.

[Baby Fawkes]

milee - That's an almost identical situation to what I'm in. I'm happy to pay for the coupons I used, but they don't seem to want to let me without requiring me to prove that I originally purchased them. The slight difference is that their supervisors are saying that they cannot resolve it unless I send them my credit card statements. That's not happening, so until they provide me a more acceptable solution for resolving it, the extra $280 that was incorrectly refunded back to me will just sit in my account.

The only thing that will make me get back to the issue is if they somehow realize their mistake and attempt to charge the credit card back for the money. At that point I would get the credit card company involved. (probably not bother for the $280, but will definitely if they take the $2995 back that I cannot use anymore)

[midjd]

OMG, what a cluster!

The only downside is a moral / ethical dilema, but I'm comfortable with the fact that I have tried to correct it and pay back the amount that was accidentally refunded for stuff I've already used, but they seem to be making it almost impossible for me to do that.

I agree with this. Although I think the customer has an obligation to bring mistakes (in their favor) to the merchant's attention, I don't think the customer should have to turn over questionably relevant private info or go out of his or her way to correct the mistake if it was the merchant's fault. IMO you went above and beyond what was ethically required of you.

In my situation, I was happy to re-pack the recliners and leave them in the garage for easy pickup, but I was not willing to take a(nother) day off work to be home for the pickup because Amazon didn't want to pay the after-hours freight charges.

I think I ended up ahead by the price of one recliner, but after I informed at least two different CSRs at Amazon that they had undercharged me and no adjustment was ever made, I figured I did my part.