Chelsea hosted Tottenham Hotspur in a crucial English Premier League soccer match last Sunday. Tottenham (nicknamed “Spurs”), hadn’t won at Chelsea’s stadium, Stamford Bridge, since 1990, but wound up winning 3-1. I support Spurs, so the result was an enjoyable one.
But the joy was tempered by painful memories and it wasn’t just because it had been so long since my team had triumphed playing an away game at Chelsea. For it was in trying to purchase tickets for the equivalent match last season that I fell victim to my first — and hopefully last — online scam. Knowing I would be in London during the last week of November 2016, when Chelsea were playing Spurs, I tried to buy a pair of tickets a month in advance for the sell-out game, but it proved impossible. In desperation, I turned to popular online classified marketplace Craigslist to purchase tickets.
The site was awash with third-party ticket offers to the match but one post in particular stood out. Two tickets were on sale for £180 ($250). The seller was impressively specific about where the seats were located and the view of the proceedings. The quoted price was above-the-odds, but not extortionate. And I didn’t have to supply my bank details to the seller. Instead I was asked to deposit money into his account.
It didn’t strike me as a scam. But not long after putting the money into the seller’s account, I realized I had been defrauded. The seller stopped being responsive and, despite multiple requests, I received neither the tickets nor my money back.
Having been advised that going through Craigslist was a waste of time, I underwent a torturous, but ultimately successful, journey to get the scammed money back.
Here’s what I learned along the way.
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Look twice, even if you consider yourself a savvy consumer
I’ll save you time scrolling down to the comments section and weighing in on my lack of judgment by fessing up now to having been incredibly gullible with my Craigslist purchase. I pride myself on being the cautiously discerning, savvy consumer who doesn’t get taken in by online con artists.
So what went wrong? The devil was in the details.
The triple whammy of a very specific event description, the fact that I didn’t have to hand over my own bank account details and that the tickets were being sold for a fair, but not unrealistically low, price threw me. That this was a high-demand sporting occasion expedited my misguided haste to buy them.
Yet this wouldn’t have happened if I had spent two minutes beforehand undertaking online due diligence instead of doing that just after I had made the purchase. Had I done so, I would have soon found another message on Craigslist warning me of the seller having scammed others in the past.
In most cases, a brief online check will establish the veracity or otherwise of the third-party seller. But I didn’t do my homework.
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Anticipate apathy
Once I realized I had been scammed, I swiftly contacted the customer services departments of both my multinational investment bank, which I had taken the money out of, and the account to which I had paid the money in, which turned out to be a leading U.K. digital banking services company.
However, a depressing pattern emerged. My bank pledged to investigate the matter on the phone. I would then follow-up via email and not hear back from them. After asking them to reply to me on Twitter, I would receive cheerily generic responses stating they were looking into the problem but “we do have to allow the other bank the time to investigate this account fully.”
While they had earlier notified me of the identity of the institution to which the money had gone and said they would seek to indemnify the transaction, I found my bank’s customer service department came up short when it came to following through and making any refund happen.
The “other bank” was hardly more proactive, saying they could not discuss customer accounts with third parties over the phone and not getting back to me via email. Countless attempts to connect my bank and the digital banking services company and have them collaborate on getting the sum back to me proved fruitless too.
One hurdle I had to overcome concerned the sum that had been scammed. Losing $250 gave me 250 reasons to care about the fraudulent transaction. But it soon became apparent that the fact it was a relatively minor amount of money compared to the sums involved in other financial shakedowns meant it wasn’t as much of a concern to the financial institution as it might have otherwise have been.
The lowest point in resolving what seemed a relatively straightforward matter came when two months after I had bought the tickets, my bank’s fraud division told me over the phone that my case report hadn’t been updated after four weeks.
It was time for a new strategy.
Aim high
“If you want to go far in heaven, you have to get close to God,” 19th-century novelist Balzac observed in his 1835 classic “Pere Goriot.” Had Balzac lived in the era of the online scam, he would have further appreciated the wisdom of his words.
I had spent the first two months of my quest to retrieve the money outlining the issue to my bank and the digital banking services company. Yet despite my bank’s sunny customer service replies, neither institution seemed all that bothered to resolve the case.
In January 2017, my patience snapped after I saw the CEO of my bank speak at the World Economic Forum in Davos. I discovered his email address by going on the website myceo.com and wrote him an emotionally-charged email outlining my unhappiness with the situation, adding “while I appreciate you are very busy, away from Davos and the C-Suite, this is the reality faced by your customers.”
The email met with no response but a week later a representative from the bank called me to say the CEO had passed on my note. Immediately she arranged to refund me for the cost of the copious phone calls I had made to the bank up to this point and pledged she would get the digital banking services company to repay the funds.
The representative later established that the money was no longer held in the account to which I had paid it into. But in the meantime I had also contacted the CEO of the digital banking services company. A month later I got the money back “as a goodwill gesture.”
I have no doubt that I had not gone to the top, I would still be waiting for the money to be returned. Of course CEOs have more important things to do in regards to their company’s leadership and direction than overseeing financial queries from customers concerning relatively insignificant sums of money.
Yet it was only their involvement that spurred both institutions into action. My dealings with the customer service and fraud departments reminded me of the old joke about being given all assistance short of actual help.
Know what you’re getting into
It took me four months to get the $250 back. Evenings and weekends were spent writing to my bank and the digital banking services company.
I was so determined acting on a point of principle to get the money back that it never dawned on me that the amount of time I spent on retrieving it might have been more productively spent doing other things.
Even though I was awarded a full refund and a rebate for my telephone conversations, the price I paid in time and effort was considerable. I shudder to think of the opportunity cost.
Meantime, unlike last weekend, Chelsea won the game that I bought the fake tickets to. So had I gone to the match as I had intended, the result would have left me feeling miserable.
Therefore while the scammer was out to get me financially, in other ways — however indirectly — he was looking after my best interests by ensuring I wouldn’t attend. There’s a lesson in there somewhere...