Fraudsters

I am fed up with being given the runaround by unscrupulous merchants.  The most recent example of this occurred recently.  I had ordered a limited edition James Bond replica prop online last week (a Moonraker laser gun!).  This was after an extensive search on the internet i.e. checking Amazon and ebay.  I found the cheapest price was from an external seller on Amazon, and – a useful little piece of advice – I actually checked whether the seller had their own website and looked at the price on that, and it was even cheaper.  So I ordered it from there.  Got my e-mail confirmation, and didn’t think more about it until this week.  I wanted to know the status of my order – I hadn’t received any shipping info – so checked online and found that it had been cancelled but nobody had told me.  I happened to be paying my credit card this week, and so I knew that my credit card had already been charged for the order.  Nice of the seller to contact me I thought, as the alarm bells were going off.  So I contacted them, and found out that they had cancelled the order as it was flagged as possibly fraudulent because the shipping address on my order was different to my credit card address.  This in itself is a joke – I wanted it delivered to my workplace rather than my home address – and is hardly a reason to cancel an order.  And I’ve done this many times before, and never had an issue.  They told me to get in touch with my bank – I did, but nothing they could do as nothing was flagged as fraudulent on my end and the charge went through on my credit card.  So after some back and forth with the merchant, they told me I should reorder the item.  I had some concerns – mainly that I wanted to make sure that I wouldn’t be double-charged, but they assured me that my previous order would be refunded (it hasn’t yet).  And then, disappointingly but unsurprisingly, the item has disappeared from their website so I can’t reorder it.  I happened to check Amazon, and it is still there (at the slightly higher price) from the same merchant.  This is all too suspicious.  And all for a crappy plastic copy of a gun from one of the worst Bond films.  Not happy.  Probably not worth it.  I’m not reordering anything until I get my money back from the cancelled order – at least I’ve got e-mail proof if I need to dispute the charge.