E G.

I was this close when I got that *tingling* feeling and realized I needed to do some research. And boy howdy, lo and behold, LOOK AT ALL THESE COMPLAINTS.

There seems to be a large network of Chinese companies trying to sell crap through American sites (or does it just come up American for me?) and not giving people the goods. I got scammed by one site last year. I was searching for binoculars, a particular Celestron model that was first manufactured years ago but was still popular enough to be on Amazon. I went looking for a cheaper price elsewhere online. Another e-commerce site came up in my search as selling one for almost half the price. I ordered from their site and received no update as to when anything was shipping or any response to inquiries. After two months of back and forth with Paypal, Paypal had to pay up.

I reported my experience on a site like Site Jabber. I happened to be the first one, so I came back to check up on further reviews over time. Subsequently, it turned out that lots of people had the same experience: they ordered and waited with no reply from them.

What most victims of that site didnt know is that the -- COMPANY PHYSICAL ADDRESS -- was to an apartment complex somewhere in California. These scammers showed no concern that someone could figure out what kind of place the address was located at: with some digging, I found a picture of the address with a banner for apartment vacancies on one face of the building.

An apartment complex. Let that sink in.

What eventually happened is that my bank discontinued my card number several months later (*without telling me I might add!) because "you may have ordered from a site online that was hacked." Mu****. F******.

E-commerce scammers are using "addresses" as one of their tools to make them appear as a legitimate online retail store. All you need is for one person to not do enough digging and they have your money. I bet you thought to yourself "the price is right. Look how low it is? That is so cheap. Its only a few dollars."

The item that brought me to this complaint site for Mini In The Box?
It was priced at $3.99, $8 cheaper than a similar wire shown on their site, listed, I assume, to make it appear it was a better deal. But wait, theres more. I found Mini In The Box because I was looking for a 3.5/ USB mini jack charging/aux wire for my bluetooth speaker that I had snapped. I found one on Ebay and one on Amazon - but both would have to come from CHINA and would take now until the middle of December to get here. I would have to wait a month, and believe it or not, I really needed this wire right away.

Using more rudimentary boolean logic, I entered my search as "mini USB adapter cable." Mini In The Box listed the wire I needed as USB 2.0 & 3.5mm Male to Mini USB 2.0 Male Data&Charging Cable(0.3M) #*******. I was excited when I saw that the dates they listed for arrival of the shipment was over TWO WEEKS SOONER than on Ebay and Amazon.

But wait. Where is it coming from? My research led me to Site Jabber, where I found out that Mini In The Box would also be shipping it from China, regardless of the PHYSICAL ADDRESS they have listed on their site! This has to be the same CHINESE COMPANY selling crap on EBAY and AMAZON - so I would never get my item either way!

And here we have yet another "cheap, hard-to-find but very popularly searched" item that I found on a site that appeared as a credible online retailer. They too utilized advanced cascading style sheets, login credentials, and card encryption as a means to goad people to trust them enough to give them money. Essentially, just a CRM database mixed up as a card payment gateway.

This is probably the fifth instance of this scam I have personally encountered in the past two years. For instance, I "requested to order" a pair of escrima sticks from a site that looked like it was part of the Yahoo! Store network. I say request because apparently that is not what I ordered and when I asked why, they said that the photo on the site showing -2- sticks did not invalidate the inference (omission is more like it) in the text that it was -1- stick I would be ordering. The text did not say this, but the customer service supervisor was not budging. With some digging, you know what I found out? THEY WERE PART of YET ANOTHER CHINESE CONGLOMERATE!

In another instance I purchased an induction range on Amazon, best price anywhere with the best measure of reviews. The pot they included (steel pot) to sweeten the deal was burning through because I got one of the defective models that had the coils manufactured too close together. It was burning my food. When I emailed the seller to request an RMA, there ensued the mother of all ridiculous email chains spanning nearly THIRTY EXCHANGES, which resulted in me finally getting fed up enough to contact Amazon and demand my money back. In the midst of this comedic cluster, it started dawning on me that CHINA has agents in America working their customer service, talking to us "on our level" by disclosing "inside information" about "distribution chains" and that agent was from "another part of the distribution chain" and that it was them to blame, but they would do their "best to make up for any inconvenience." It wasnt their fault that I had an abusive agent emailing me - it was Amazons. Does this sound familiar, you the person who finds themselves hooked on every word of my diatribe? It feels sickening, doesnt it?

I also learned that these online retailers IN CHINA are dealing in orders a magnitude of which you cannot fathom. One of these boiler room escalated customer service reps would lead me to believe their company worked with TENS. OF THOUSANDS. OF ORDERS. A DAY. With thousands of return requests to add to the daily count. And I am not talking Alibaba here. I am talking about one of the many tentacles of these CHINESE syndicates that sell through Amazon and botch customer service on a regular basis.

The excuse the disgruntled agent gave me within the first third of this email thread was that -Rosewill- was not getting back to -them- to help -me- with my issue. *laughs in tears*

~
China, you are going to lose ground in the American retail market. You are throwing legitimate American companies under the bus for your abuses. We have said for years that you make crap and dont answer for it, and here you are again. If Amazon wants to continue doing business with China, Amazon is not going to be around for much longer -- the customers will float away. It would become an epic downfall of biblical proportions. And how? Reviews. Reviews outside of Amazon - about Amazon.

Customers: start to look for BBB complaints. They are a PITA to file. The BBB takes weeks to wait for a reply from the business, and take weeks to reply to the complainant. The BBB is like any other underfunded agency. In my experience they do nothing but file your complaint for the world to see. Thats it. So, the reviews you see on the BBB sites are from people who sacrificed a good amount of personal time to let you know to stay away from a business as they had to keep hounding BBB to let them know what their determination was.

Also, take a close look at what elements on any page lead you to believe that it is a trustworthy site. Mini In The Box uses lots of dynamic frames, lots of stock photography, placed in a standard e-commerce format. Those buttons at the bottom of their site? > MEAN NOTHING. The links that give you information about - who they are? > MEAN NOTHING. The fact you are creating a login for yourself? > MEANS NOTHING.

One more thing: there was a time when consumers believed a company more trustworthy if they responded online to criticism or bad reviews. This is no longer the case. Look at how many of these negative reviews the company responded to. Scammers think that all they need to say is "send us an email and we will sort it out for you" and we the audience will wash our hands of it. If you look more carefully, you will see that people have responded to those requests only to have the same thing happened. And if you look even more closely, you will see that these companies are creating their own FAKE NEGATIVE REVIEWS to respond to so that someone will say "this company took care of me like they said they would." Yes, it is a conspiracy!

DISCLAIMER: I worked for Yahoo! Small Business Merchant Services, the money-making division of Yahoo! We worked with large online retail stores generating revenue for Yahoo! In the billions. What these people are doing are no different than when Yahoo! Had a rash of Vietnamese scammers building online stores; they would use stolen card info to set up a store, they created a bunch of fake orderable items/ SKUs (*look back over MINI IN THE BOX: doesnt it appear they have an impressive amount of SKUs?) then bounce with the money once enough people started catching on that they werent going to deliver.

These scammers messed with the wrong person. I know what these people are doing. I don't know who you are. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. I will look for you, I will find you, and I will - just a minute Mom! Im almost done writing this bad review of this scammy CHINESE e-commerce site!

Update: It only took three days before Mini In The Box responded. See below. I rest my case people.