How to Report a Dispute Please fill out all 9 questions below. You must provide proof or your claim cannot be validated. 1. Date Dispute Happened April 5, 2020 2. Are You The Buyer or Seller I'm the Buyer 3. Total Transaction Value $35 USD 4. Other Parties Username @mathewmj1977 5. Method Used To Pay or Receive Payment Middleman 6. Other Parties Email Addresses [email protected] 7. Other Parties Payment Email Address 8. Other Parties Messenger Username Discord: artecha#6210 9. Provide All Chat Logs and Additional Information Below Middleman 3Way Convo: https://www.playerup.com/conversati...tion-id-922195884-3-way-conversation.1534898/ I'll make this as short as possible because I really do not have the time to put up this gentleman. I gave him every opportunity to approve my cancellation request before I got here but sadly that was ignored since he was online 9 hours ago going about his business. Beginning I came across this gentleman's post about 10K non drop and engaging users for $35. I said let me give him a shot because I really wanted to buy the blue tick verification from him. $35 is nothing to loose compared to $2000 . I'm glad I did because it was a total nightmare from start to finish Timeline (please note these are in my local time. The Scammer will have different times if he choses to rebuttal this post) D/M/Y 5/4/20 @ 15:25 - Inquired about his Insta Famous Offer via PM. (Never received a response so I figured he probably only speaks to paying customers since he was online that whole time) 5/4/20 @ 16:53 - Paid for his $35 offer for 10k followers via @Middleman 6/4/20 @ 03:18 - Got approved and 3way convo started 6/4/20 @ 07:44 - Sent all info this seller would need to start my gig (I read his post very carefully so understood what he needed to start) 6/4/20 @ 09:23 - He responds to ask me for the same information I sent him before hand (Red Alert activated because clearly he didn't read my response) 6/4/20 @ 09:24 - I entertained the request and replied almost instantly with the info he needed again. 7/4/20 @ Entire Day - No response from seller even though he was online a couple times well 7/4/20 @ 16:04 - Message seller on PM but received no response 8/4/20 @ 11:34 - Messaged seller on discord to get an update. No response even though he was online on Playerup 9/4/20 @ 11:15 - Messaged PUBLICALLY on his post asking for an update 9/4/20 @ 11:30 - Seller responds in FIFTEEN minutes to my public message. He then blocks me from posting publicly on that thread. (I have screenshots) 9/4/20 @ 18:03 - I respond privately and ask for the update he still didn't send 9/4/20 @ 18:08 - Seller responds to say he is a team and he doesn't have to respond via discord then provides an update saying he will complete my order in 96 hours at very latest 9/4/20 @ 19:27 - I respond to call him out on his BS claims since I always opted to contact him via PM first. Plus he's been online constantly and refused to handle my active order. 9/4/20 @ 20:15 - He sends approximately 680 accounts to the profile I sent him. Checked those profiles and over 640 of them were recognised to be bots. 13/4/20 @ 01:08 - I responded to cancel this request since I saw the seller online on numerous occasions with him not communicating about my order and this is the SECOND deadline he missed. Also, sent him proof of the bot accounts and all the accounts that dropped. 14/4/20 @ 11:22 - Seller gave poor excuses about "his team" prioritizes messages on Playerup then ones from WhatsApp etc. (Blatant lie because I always responded to him via PM first then other places after it was only when I contacted him PUBLICALLY was when I received a quick response) 14/4/20 @ 13:51 - Requested seller to approve my cancellation request yet again 14/4/20 @ 15:11 - Seller made more excuses. Then responded again to ask if im sure I want a refund. (NOTE: realise how quickly im receiving "updates" now?) 14/4/20 @ 18:57 - Informed seller I would making this public if I revisit playerup and do not see my request approved. 14/4/20 @ 21:15 - Seller was seen online 15/4/20 @ 07:30 - Here is my post because seller was seen online just moments before I clicked submit. SMH Conclusion Please stay away from this seller at all costs. I've given him 2 opportunities to make things right and he chose to play cat and mouse. Clearly he is not professional enough to man up to his short comings and trust me when I say, you do not need that for your business.
Accusation 1: SCAMMER Counter-statement: The entire PlayerUp community knows that this is an escrow platform. For some people who are not able to understand what an escrow payment is, let us clarify it for them. Buyer pays to the middleman, the middleman holds the money with them, the seller delivers the order ENTIRELY ON HIS OWN EXPENSES and then buyer marks the order as delivered. Once the order is FULLY delivered, and the buyer and middleman verify it ONLY THEN seller is eligible to receive the amount. If the order fails or gets canceled, the seller is responsible to pay for the entire cost on his own for the partial delivery. Since the order was never completed, we never received a single penny from the buyer. So before calling someone a scammer, someone needs to learn about the different kind of businesses and transaction modes. Accusation 2: "Only speaks to paying customers since he was online that whole time" Counter-statement: Any one among the thousands of customers, we have already served, knows this that we respond to PMs and you do not need to purchase a service before receiving a response from us. A sales query was initiated by the Buyer on April 4, 2020. A response time of 24-48 hours is standard for any business and since he could not wait to receive a respond earlier that week, he did not receive one. The working hours are mentioned in our TOS (Point-7). Even sellers on Amazzon or E- bay will take 24-48 hours, now you will call them scammers too. Accusation 3: He responds to ask me for the same information I sent him before hand (Red Alert activated because clearly he didn't read my response) Counter-statement: The buyer's first message was 'Account username for instagram followers: @cpoalmighty" Using that username our servers received an error message, if you do not believe us, go ahead visit https://www.instagram.com/@cpoalmighty. At this point our team sincerely asked the buyer "Please provide me your link." LINK means a working URL which was then provided by the Buyer in the second message as https://www.instagram.com/cpoalmighty. Let us make this very clear, the @ sign is used to tag a username of profile, this is not a part of the username. In messaging board we use the @ symbol because it brings a list of the available user in the platform and makes it available to tag them. Our team does not check the symbols or any other special characters in each username. We just simply copy and paste the username at the end of the Instagram URL, if it works then we proceed, if it does not, then we just request for the URL. If someone cannot understand the difference between URL and username, then he clearly needs to stop using Instagram and internet in general. And yes our team could have figured it out on its own by trying it a couple of times, but since we do not deal with a single order everyday, we simply asked for the URL from the Buyer. Just because of a simple symbol the entire username can change, and since sometimes because of a typo (misplaced _ or .) orders gets delivered on wrong profile, we have stopped editing the username on our own judgement (we do not check anymore which symbol is allowed, which is not, which combination is a working link, which is not). We would simply copy paste as it is provided, if it works fine or else we would ask for a link. And we hope this was not TOO MUCH TO ASK FOR. Accusation 4: No response from seller (this has been repeatedly mentioned by the buyer) Counter-statement: As already mentioned to the Buyer MULTIPLE TIMES (which he is clearly either not able to understand or accept because he is frustrated), we have an entire team using this account. This is for the general public (since it has been told multiple times to the Buyer and he clearly cannot comprehend)- We have a customer support team handling the PMs and messages on 3-way tickets and the technical team that deals with the order processing and the contents and threads in the marketplace. Just because our technical team is using the account and it shows online here, does not mean that our support team is ready to respond or that we are avoiding your message. PlayerUp only allows a single profile for a single seller so both our technical team and our customer support team uses a single account and it will show online anytime any of them is online. But only our customer support team handles the message tickets and they have a fixed working hour. As a company we have assigned roles to our team, and each team only handles their own responsibility. We do not allow one team to interrupt in other team's activity as each of them are responsible for their own success and failures. This way we can segregate where the issues are coming from, from which team member etc. etc. And this is a thumb-rule for all customers and if you want our technical team to leave their order-processing requests but instead start replying to your messages, then we are sorry this is not how it works. Accusation 5: Seller responds in FIFTEEN minutes to my public message. He then blocks me from posting publicly on that thread. Counter-statement: Read statement-4 for the "seller was ignoring me" part and regarding the ban, check our Terms of Services point-7. Any attempts to spam our threads or our support channel with multiple requests to get your request processed earlier will result in disregarding your request and banning you from replies/support system without any support provided. It was our technical team who handles the sales thread & order processing and you were banned from the thread by them, as they are ONLINE ALL THE TIME (who else do you think processes the orders?). After you were banned, the support team was informed, and we responded you asking you to wait as your order was in progress. The thread posting is only restricted to messages about a sales query or anything related to the thread itself. Any ongoing order should be restricted to the 3-way ticket or PM. If you have any issue you can choose 'Buyer needs MM support'. But instead you chose to spam the public threads. Accusation 6: Regarding the refund Seller made more excuses. Then responded again to ask if im sure I want a refund. Counter-statement: We did not make excuses or delayed the refund. The Buyer was frustrated regarding his delivery failure and so we gave him an explanation. This was our response to the Buyer (in addition to the explanation regarding the delay in his order) "We will gladly cancel and refund your order, we do not force our services on anyone. But as a business it is our responsibility to provide explanation to our customers for the delays and come back with a response if someone is slandering us because of confusion. We will gladly send your order for refund but we need you to understand what went on and what did not. We only want you to leave with either your delivered order or your money back, but we do not want a customer to leave with misunderstood facts. We just want to ask you once more to confirm if you want us to cancel your order and refund it or process it in priority (as it has crossed the deadline)." Any real person with a sense of intelligence can see that nobody denied anyone of a refund. Accusation 7: NOTE: realise how quickly im receiving "updates" now? Counter-statement: Already mentioned to the Buyer in the message, which he again clearly did not read (or understand?). "About your order, since its deadline was crossed on Friday, it was moved to the priority list. Soon as our team and servers were online again from this Monday, we put your order on priority and we were ready to handle it before you showed your concern. We explained to you the reason of the delay and since your order is in the priority list right now, even the support team is responding to it at the earliest because it is pinned at the top of the support group (all orders that cross the deadlines are immediately put to priority list)." There is an option allowing us to stick the conversation thread to the top (if you know how to use internet and messaging board). All delayed orders are sent to priority list to be handled first both in support and in order processing. Accusation 8: Informed seller I would making this public if I revisit playerup and do not see my request approved. Seller was seen online. Counter-statement: The seller was seen online? Read statement-4. Do you really want our technical team (that handles only order processing and sales threads) to issue a refund request to the middleman in the middle of the night when the customer-support team is past their working hours? Finally some additional information regarding this order so the general public can know how "unprofessionally" we handled this order (as per the Buyer). (a) Delay in order: The reason this order was delayed, as has been mentioned to the Buyer multiple times but still he cannot read (or accept it), here was our explanation and apology. "Regarding your order, we sincerely apologize for the delay. Our technical team and most of our servers are majorly based in Europe and Asia. Since the past 7-10 days due to sudden lockdowns and many restrictions put by these countries caused a lot of disruption within many businesses, including ours. We were forced also to shut down the offices and shift the work strictly to our residences. We are sure as an individual you are also facing many challenges during this pandemic. As a business, we can only assure you that even in these difficult time we will continue to provide you our services & support now and ever. To assure that the internal issues do not arise again, we have shifted the entire work to our residences and we will continue from here until the entire situation is resolved. Our servers are back online and we are reprocessing all pending orders right now. We kindly request you to provide us additional 24 hours and you will definitely see progress in your order. After your order starts again, it will be completed in its usual course." (b) Delay in response: (Applicable to all our orders last week, as is already mentioned to all our other customers) Our customer support team was not running with full staff because of the SAME issue as mentioned in point-a. Last week we faced a lot of delayed orders and a lot of delayed responses. And we are not ignoring that fact. The general time for response is 24-48 hours and last week we took much longer to respond and since the entire scenario from sale to order cancellation took place last week, this particular buyer thinks we was exploited (even though he has been given reasonable explanation). The rest of the buyers are being handled as usual since we are back online and we do not mind canceling an order if someone is not interested (or ready to listen). (c) Drop in followers: Again was mentioned to the Buyer but he cannot read (or accept it). "Regarding the drop in your followers, it is normal during the order processing. Our company recently started working with a very unique server system that only gives you compatible followers. While the order is in progress, it sends a stream of followers to your profile and ONLY the COMPATIBLE followers stays, while the other incompatible followers drop. Facing some drops during the order processing is very common and it is a part of the procedure. Once the algorithm calculates the compatibility factor for your profile, it becomes easier for the server to send only those unique compatible profiles. So initially you might face slow speed and some major drops. But as your order progresses, and the algorithm calculates your compatibility factor, the drops will become less and speed will increase with more COMPATIBLE profiles. Even after the order completion, if there are some few drops, they are automatically refilled based on your compatibility factor. Due to the recent internal issues caused due to the lockdown and other restrictions, we had to pause our servers. It took some time to send your order for reprocessing once the servers were online again. This caused your profile to face drops with no gain in compatible followers. And overall with no positive gain, your profile might look like it is going down, but in reality only the order stopped delivering. Once it starts again, it will complete as usual and as per the algorithm, the compatible followers will stay without a drop." (d) Regarding refund: The Buyer's money which was being locked by the Middleman until the order was completed (as per the escrow transaction) will be credited back to the Buyer as his order has been canceled from our end. OUR TEAM TOOK 24 HOURS TO CANCEL THE ORDER, and we hope 24 hours does not imply a "unprofessional delay". PS: Calling someone a scammer in an ongoing escrow payment clearly drew the line between what was logical and what was not. If we were an unprofessional scammer, thousands of other satisfied customers would not be leaving us positive responses. But just like any other business, we also have to deal with salty customers and here we are. Thanks & Regards, Social-Xtream
@Rolan This is a middleman secured transaction there is no point of a dispute kindly address this at your earliest Regards
There were no scams that occured here. On part of the buyer @interested234, it is understandable how they reacted on how their order is being handled even tho the seller were seen online multiple times during the transaction but always remember to give the other party time to provide their response before doing any actions like this. @Mathewj1977 has also had previous disputes opened against them, some were resolved almost instantly. They are also one of the biggest seller here in PlayerUp so rest assured that the service you purchased from them success or fail they will handle it accordingly in a timely manner. @Middleman will begin the cancellation process after both parties requested for the cancellation which may still take time as they are also handling many orders so we'll have to ask both especially the buyer to remain patient during this procedure.
I've been in the online business for over 17 years and I very well know how ticket systems work, I can guarantee that ticket systems DO NOT allow you to be "LOGGED IN" querying any #. Not on Twitter. Not on Instagram. Not even on FB. The ticket system will port the queries into their centralised system to allow a "team" to handle it from there. Then, it allows you to reply and literally spits the answer back to the designated user. I would love to know what ticket system allows your "staff" to be presented as "online" on a forum. @Rolan I would recommend you read my 3way convo when I confronted him about that "sharing account" nonsense and come back to this forum to see him perfect the answer for public appeal. @mathewmj1977 you're really special. No where in your posts you said you need my "Link" . I specially told you the username to use is @cpoalmighty . If you do not know how to interpret that then you had to be a real fool indeed. Even socialblade doesn't even ask for a "link" they say enter your "username" . Please get a high school education before responding. Basic maths and English would suffice. Drop followers is not the issue. The issue is you sent across under 1k followers after I had valid points. You failed to even apologise for your delayed blunder because quite frankly you did not care. You then sat on this for 3 days without communication. That's the problem Mathew. I'm not complaining about followers dropping because I read your TOS and I understood it. Your lack communication is very piss-poor for a "professional" in the industry. Even if you are having "Technical issues" the best thing to do is to communicate that with your paying customers. It's basic knowledge for people with any sense of manners. Regarding refund - I've been communicating with this guy right up to the point where I requested my refund. (Please note "I have" meaning I have initiated every communication about this service. Not once he would take the time to update me on the progress of this service because he was not working on it) I've mentioned my view and what I wanted from the get go. You still respond 3 times after that to counter my demands. I do not want your shoddy service. I want my money back. It's that simple. All of a sudden he goes offline then his "Technical team" comes on to "deal with other things" and they have no access to any of my messages because they are using a special "ticket system" which allows you to log into a forum but hide Private Messages???? Come on people...this does not happen. smh. If it does, then tell me the exact software that allows you to do that because I need one too! As it relates to you blocking me....the post is still there. Anyone can visit https://www.playerup.com/threads/10...engagement-guaranteed-lifetime.4225654/page-3 and see I wasn't spamming or asking for my order to be expedited. Quite frankly I really cannot understand why Rolan would be up in here on his side. I asked simple questions when days passed and I didn't receive a response from the seller on this same forum. I had to post publicly to get his attention. How come he responded so fast? Wasn't it is "support team" online? Come on people...let common sense prevail.
Show me where the spam is or where I was trying to expedite my order? My order was late at this point so I wasn't trying to expedite anything. I was trying to find out the STATUS of my order. That's it. As everyone can see, I reached out to him privately FIRST before trying him in a public setting. Clearly he was ignoring my responses.
Unless you have used the PlayerUp seller account, you have no right to make presumptions on how the system works here. The seller account gives you additional privileges to your account which you cannot see in a buyer's account. Doesn't matter what forum page you are visiting, even if you just change your profile picture for that matter, the user will be shown as online. The "online" status on PlayerUp does not at all signifies that the user is accessing the DMs or the 3-way ticket. You can be buying some item, posting a thread, changing your setting, or doing anything at all, it will always show you online. The online status is not about your availability in the messaging board, but your overall presence in the website. We urge you to expand your knowledge because every website is different and internet is full of things that even your 17 years of experience will not able to cover. If you disagree with us, ask the Admin, Middleman or any Moderator. The online status has nothing to do with our team being checking our messaging threads. Since you have been in online business for 17 years, we think your knowledge is obsolete just like your continuous rambling around the same points that are being explained to you but you still cannot follow. The way SocialBlade works is not relevant with how other websites works. Every website uses a different code, comparing them and then complaining how they are different will leave you nowhere. Some websites would only ask you for the username because the rest url link (https://www.intagram.com/) is repetitive so it is already part of the code. If you know how the username is used as an input and added at the end of the URL string, you would know that ultimately it is the URL that is used to establish the conenction and access your profile and not your just your username. And if you disagree, next time go to any social media marketing website and in the input field where is says 'Enter Username to process your order', try to enter it with @ and you will see what happens. We did not ask you for the link? At this point it is clear that you are not reading anything being explained to you and just posting your own salty comments since your mind is made up that you are being exploited. In response to your VERY FIRST MESSAGE, we asked you to give your link (URL). We already informed you our customer support team was not running with full staff last week. We already admitted that many messages and many orders were delayed due to this short-staff issue. Why we suddenly went short-staff last week has already been explained to you, it has nothing to do with exploiting you. Regarding your ignorant comment "they have no access to any of my messages because they are using a special "ticket system"", I think you forgot to read what is said above (just like you have been ignoring everything ever since you made up your mind about the exploitation). Here is a short remark of what was said above; "As a company we have assigned roles to our team, and each team only handles their own responsibility. We do not allow one team to interrupt in other team's activity as each of them are responsible for their own success and failures. This way we can segregate where the issues are coming from, from which team member etc. etc. And this is a thumb-rule for all customers and if you want our technical team to leave their order-processing requests but instead start replying to your messages, then we are sorry this is not how it works." You cannot comment on how we choose to run our business. Every team has access to the full account in their own workstations, but we strictly tell them to stick to their own responsibilities (which is to process the order and update the threads and not replying to messages for the technical team). And why would you expect one team to clear the job regarding something they are not even responsible (just because you see them online).
All of your concerns have already been answered and we cannot repeat the same explanation over and over. The only problem is you either cannot accept it or have just overlooked and not took enough time to read and comprehend. As @Rolan has already mentioned that your order has been canceled and it is being handled by the Middleman and you will get your money back. You have made your point, we have made ours. Anyone who needs to see what happened can just take their time and read and make their own judgement. If you have a compelling urge to feel like you have been exploited (which according to us you have not been), then we are sorry but we do not have time to discuss with you for eternity, when your mind is already made up. You will receive your refund and we have already given an explanation, accept it or not, it is up to you. Thanks & Regards, Team Social-X
@interested234 No, i am not on anyone's side. At what point did it seem like i'm siding with @mathewmj1977? Also @mathewmj1977 did you explain to @interested234 about the situation regarding the lack of on-duty staff on your team before/after the start of your transaction with him? Based on how aggravated @interested234 i'm assuming you didn't or forgot to tell. Either way, there's no scam in here its just the lack of communication between both parties. @Middleman can you please sort this out real quick? Thank you.
@Rolan Soon as our team was back to full staff this week, we addressed all the issues presented to us from all our customers (this order and others). Since this order was already delayed as of Friday, we took full responsibility for it and even sticked this ticket to the top so we would be able to respond him promptly. We gave him an explanation regarding the delay and every issue he faced meanwhile, but the buyer was already frustrated since Friday and did not listen to any explanation. When we came online and gave him an explanation, he immediately lashed out at us and called us "liars", "BS", "illiterate" and so on. We repeatedly pointed out to him that it was not particularly his order but other orders as well, but he was just not ready to accept. He is under the impression that we have exploited him even after we have given him every possible explanation and every possible way to move forward.
@Rolan Even here we have posted the message once again which we sent him earlier this week explaining the delay (Point-a: Delay in order and Point-b: Delay in response) (a) Delay in order: "Regarding your order, we sincerely apologize for the delay. Our technical team and most of our servers are majorly based in Europe and Asia. Since the past 7-10 days due to sudden lockdowns and many restrictions put by these countries caused a lot of disruption within many businesses, including ours. We were forced also to shut down the offices and shift the work strictly to our residences. We are sure as an individual you are also facing many challenges during this pandemic. As a business, we can only assure you that even in these difficult time we will continue to provide you our services & support now and ever. To assure that the internal issues do not arise again, we have shifted the entire work to our residences and we will continue from here until the entire situation is resolved. Our servers are back online and we are reprocessing all pending orders right now. We kindly request you to provide us additional 24 hours and you will definitely see progress in your order. After your order starts again, it will be completed in its usual course." and (b) Delay in response: (Applicable to all our orders last week, as is already mentioned to all our other customers) Our customer support team was not running with full staff because of the SAME issue as mentioned in point-a. Last week we faced a lot of delayed orders and a lot of delayed responses. And we are not ignoring that fact. The general time for response is 24-48 hours and last week we took much longer to respond and since the entire scenario from sale to order cancellation took place last week, this particular buyer thinks we was exploited (even though he has been given reasonable explanation). The rest of the buyers are being handled as usual since we are back online and we do not mind canceling an order if someone is not interested (or ready to listen).
@Rolan @Middleman @Help @Hulk Can you kindly resolve this? The dispute is still active we clearly confirmed the cancellation and it is a middleman transaction so there is no Scamming involved. We appreciate you resolve and close this at your earliest convenience
[trigger]Guide - How To Report A Dispute Automated Response If someone you believe has scammed you, please open a Dispute Form Here. Filing a report takes 2 minutes and will then provide us the necessary information to take action against the individual and assist you at resolving the dispute. Thank you for your cooperation on this matter and sorry to hear about the problems you experienced. .[/trigger] [trigger=by]For: mathewmj1977 Re: #12[/trigger]
