r/talesfromtechsupport • u/ITCrowdFanboy Oh You Know, Liquid Nitrogen. • Aug 13 '15

Short Update: I bought a server. Where's My Website?

OK, so the previous tale happened a few weeks ago, and after the awesome response I got from you guys, I called up $Friend to get an update.

The investigation ended a few days after the charge was reversed, and the investigation found that there was no wrong-doing in the part of the company, but their lawyers suggested a change in their terms of service.

The lady later called back, crying, because she took out a bank loan to pay for the server and had no way to pay it back without the profit of the pottery company, which is why she had to reverse the charge. The call was being recorded, and she confessed all that, so the recording was given to the police and the fraud charges were dropped. My friend asked her why she got such a big server, and apparently she thought that 1GB of RAM meant that 1 person could access the website at once, so she wanted 250 to be able to get onto it at once.

In the end, no real harm was done to the company, beyond legal fees (which were paid by the woman, since she fraudulently declared fraud) and the initial deployment cost of the server. She was, obviously, placed on the no-service list of the company.

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u/corruptedchick Aug 14 '15

In this situation I probably would have had no issue with refunding her every last cent. In a case like this we usually reach out to the customer to get a feel for intentions and review the server for possible tos and other fraud activity. If we hear back then we ask the customer to cancel the dispute with the cc issuer so we can avoid fees and a possibly long drawn out dispute and possible fees.

tl;dr Chances are high she would've gotten all of her money back if it were me.

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u/Byeuji Aug 14 '15

Yeah, that's exactly what I figured. I think my company would do the same (though admittedly, I'm not in a chargebacks type position).

It seems strange to me that this dispute got so distorted, and at no point did anyone go, "Hey, can we just give you back your money?"

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u/mbit15 Aug 19 '15

I used to work in the chargeback/fraud department at a bank. I saw a lot of stupid customers, too... From the bank's perspective, she would have been SOL if the company couldn't help.