I have referenced Richard Dawkins’ reactions to a chatbot (see Stupid MFers in the News thread) this evening in dealing with what I now believe is a fake website from which I ordered a product. The email receipt I got was so completely anonymous that I became very suspicious, so I wrote asking them if they are a real company. I got this:
Hello ,
We appreciate your feedback,but we are a legitimate business. If you have any specific concerns or issues, please let us know directly so we can address them for you. We are here to help and ensure your experience is a positive one.
Thank you.
This is what I sent in return:
Thank you for answering. You can start by providing me with the URL of your website, as I requested. Also I would like to know where you are located, and where the product I ordered will be shipped from.
My specific concern is whether I will actually receive the product I have paid for, and when. The communications I have had to date could easily be the product of a fairly primitive AI chat bot. I am not Richard Dawkins, and so far I do not think you are a conscious entity.
Thank you.
I am frankly surprised I got any kind of answer at all. I believe they are trying to string me along until either I forget to do so or it is too late to do a chargeback on my credit card. I’m giving them a week, tops.
You said in the OP that you ordered from a web site and implied that it might be that of a fake company. Did you lose that URL as you asked for it in your mail? The URL would be in your browser’s history, wouldn’t it? Is the e-mail in response to yours from that domain?
Are you emailing the contact on the same website that you ordered from? If it’s a scam, I wouldn’t expect them to answer honestly when asked if they are a genuine company.
Someone correct me if I am wrong but I don’t think it would be against board rules to post the website URL here, as long as you make it not immediately clickable - either by spoilering it, or by breaking the URL up something like this: google dot com
The general rule in cases like this though, is: if you’re asking, it’s a scam.
Many of the legit vendors I deal with are in China. On the occasions I have to communicate directly with them, the emails / texts / whatevers all have a similar bland non-specific nature.
It’s all being done through machine translation from / to the Chinese spoken by the human at the other end. Any sentence structure you use more complex than simple subject verb object with no pronouns invites mistranslation. Or non-translation. Which results in that sentence in effect being ignored.
And that’s before those vendors start adding AI agents into their mix.
I have no opinion on whether the OP’s vendor is a scam or legit. I only offer that bland emails that almost answer the question, but don’t really, are a common feature of dealing with overseas outfits working acrss language barriers.
Yes, when taking online with non-English-speakers i try to use simple sentence structures and words that don’t have multiple meanings. Latinate words can be better than Germanic ones. Although machine translation has gotten really good. (I think large language models developed from translation software, you know, language models.)
I wouldn’t dismiss a company as being fake just because it uses AI to talk to customers. I’ve gotten useful info from Microsoft’s chatbot. (I wasn’t sure how to begin to install software i bought from them. I suspect this is a common problem, and the bot gave me the answer clearly and immediately.)
Not yet. For some reason, in the email receipt, they sent me a URL for a tracking site, although that particular site does not provide a secure connection.
Yes, it would. I will see if I can find it. The email receipt is not from that domain, and the receipt domain appears to be just a splash screen in Chinese. It is crossvic dot com.
Yes, it does. That name is ERJHKLINECOM with no dot. If I put a dot in there, it comes up as a furniture retailer with an address that certainly looks like a private residence in Arizona.
No, I’m replying to the email receipt.
I’ll provide the URL I ordered from if I can find it in my browser history.
Using the timestamp from the email receipt, I was able to find the URL, it is erjhkline dot com, but when I click it from the history, it goes to some financial thing called Stripe.
I ordered a leather bag from an online company that was advertised in the New York times. It was called Bellatorri. You know the drill, hallowed Tuscan company going out of business with pictures of the father and daughter working in the leather shop, blah blah blah. It turned out to be a scam. I had used PayPal, which is a good idea when you’re venturing into unknown territory. So I did get my money back. Eventually I did get a piece of crap fake leather bag in the mail. I don’t know if this is helpful with respect to your story or not.
Here is one of their bullshit ads, so I guess people are still falling for it.
Don’t buy from here!
ETA: upon reflection, this probably isn’t even remotely helpful to your OP. Maybe it will be marginally informative to somebody. Now leaving the room…
Nevertheless, I appreciate it. I am not surprised to find scams among online search results, but I am naïve enough to be surprised to find them advertising in the NY Times.
Another reason for suspicion about my particular retailer is that they did not offer Paypal as a payment option. I am still assuming that I can charge back directly from the credit card, but they do have my card number now, so I have to be on guard against other bogus charges.
The item I ordered is produced in Japan, and so has become hard to find in the US. The price was about average. There seem to be any number of bogus retailers pretending to have thousands of kinds of Japanese items for sale, now that they are not available from the reputable retailers that we have been dealing with for years.
That’s what blew my mind. I don’t expect the NYTimes to thoroughly vet every ad, but total scams–sure. I’m guessing they’ve gotten angry reader comments so they can’t be completely unaware.
It can’t be cheap to advertise in the NYTimes, but it must be financially worthwhile or “Bellatorri” wouldn’t keep doing it.
Companies don’t typically control their online advertising. They hire a third party to serve ads and rarely have control over the content. With enough complaints they may switch providers but mostly they just cash the checks.
Even though the URL and store name is laughably bad, and the email address is just storename@outlook.com, and the physical address is some home in Arizona, you still might get your stuff. So far everything I’ve reverse-image-searched is available on Amazon so they might do you the courtesy of shipping the cheapo Amazon item to you.
What exactly did you buy from them? What are they selling that’s only available in Japan? It’s quite possible that their entire storefront has changed since you ordered but right now they are just selling basic home goods.
This is the second thing that rang my little bell, after I saw the anonymity of the email receipt, I tried to find the page I purchased from by running the search again, and they weren’t there.
What I tried to buy was a paper sampler of specialty Japanese writing paper, aimed at the fountain pen market. When I searched for it, the reputable dealers I had dealt with before were out of stock*. Then there were at least half a dozen of these other websites, which all to me now look totally bogus. Some of them are supposedly carrying thousands of pages of items; some of them show physical addresses that don’t exist.
*I dropped one of the reputable dealers a line asking about when they might be re-stocked, and they said they didn’t know, they are doing a trip to Japan in a few weeks and they will know more then. Yes, it’s much nicer dealing with actual people.
I got another email from them; they didn’t answer any of my questions, but I got a tracking number. That’s pretty fast.
The carrier is Xingjie-Express. Has anyone ever heard of it?
The package is coming from Hong Kong, and that carrier’s tracking system says that the package is in transit. Specifically, “the mail processing center has received the package.” I do not see any target delivery date. I managed to find a version of the tracking site that provides a secure connection, and apparently it is owned by or associated with that carrier. The site is called TRACK718, One-stop Logistics Tracking Any Package Platform - TRACK718 .
So, now I have to sit and wait. I signed up for email alerts. I’m still wondering if all this is real (and if they would go to all this trouble for my $35).
edited to add: on googling Xingjie-Express I found one BBB scam report, very similar details as my story except that it was for clothing. Their parcel using that delivery service tracked as far as entering the US and then nothing was ever delivered.
What’s my time limit for doing a chargeback? Is it different for each card provider?