Advice regarding a website that seemingly stole money from my gf

Morthoseth

Morthoseth

Morthoseth

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Afternoon people, I figured with the wealth of information around here someone would be able to offer decent advice regarding this issue.

The website Lextrin.com who were advertising the sale of cosmetic products based in America.

My girlfriend paid £70 for something from their website which has subsequently never arrived.

Their website for the last few weeks has been showing a holding page regarding the fact there is ongoing maintenance but I believe they have ceased trading.

The purchase was ~40 days ago via a debit card so she could attempt a chargeback request, but I'm unsure how likely that would be to work between here and America?

Where does she stand legally? Their T&C's available through a cached google page look a bit shady, but i'm not sure how binding they are legally speaking.

It may be a case of she'll not get it back, but it would be stupid to not at least ask the question

Any advice welcome

Thanks
 
Firstly, sorry to hear about this loss.

If you do a Whois lookup on the domain, (I use godaddy.com/whois to do this), you will find that they are hiding their domain registration details using a proxy service. This is a really bad sign for an e-commerce business, because it means they have something to hide. To my mind it is very likely that she has been a victim of scammers.

Getting your money back is going to be pretty difficult because you used a debit card. Had you used a credit card you would have had additional protection.

I would at least ask your bank to see if they can help at all, but more from a criminal investigation point of view. Getting the money back will be more difficult.

If you want to report it, then if it was a US site the FBI has a cybercrime department that shuts down fraudultent ecommerce operations, here's an article I found after a very quick search:

http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/police-shutter-2000-fraudulent-shopping-sites-46617

Report to the FBI and see if they will help you.

Rgds
 
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We had a fairly similar thing happen a while back with a debit card.

Phoned up the bank and said that I don't recognise this transaction, they refunded me and said they would contact the seller, if the seller could provide proof of purchase, the bank would deduct the money from the account again.

Obviously no proof was provided, and the funds are still in the account
 
Visa debit cards have the same protection (voluntarily by Visa) as the credit cards. Since nobody has already said this: contact your bank ;)
 
i was going to say debit cards have no protection but i guess i'm wrong - definitely contact the bank - thats the only thing you can do - if they can't help, you're screwed.
 
Thanks to all the people giving serious advice, I'll have her contact the bank ASAP and attempt a chargeback - it is a VISA Debit card so it could be okay.

As for some of the troll comments, I believe the product she was buying was in aid of removing stretch marks, they sold a vast array of cosmetic creams.

Or indeed, didn't sell as the case turned out...
 
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