Hi all,

I have had a customer return a fake mobile phone today.

I get the impression this isn't the customers first time doing this. They opened a return request stating 'the wrong item was sent', they have then returned a fake mobile phone using Royal Mail Special Delivery, presumably so they have proof of me receiving and it gives the impression that whatever they were returning, they wanted insured.

I have contacted Amazon support, reported abuse & opened a case informing Amazon of this fairly elaborate scam however i have recieved no help whatsoever. I am trying to get ahead of this because i already know for a fact that as soon as i deny refund, or partially refund, the customer will open an A-Z claim and i will no doubt lose the £714.99 i sold it for.

The phone the customer has returned is a fake device with a made up Serial number & IMEI. I have sent pictures of this device to Amazon but they haven't even acknowledged them.

I am unable to open a Safe-T claim and at present am unsure what options i have here, if any?

I am in two minds as to whether to report this to the police as theft. Though i know that doesn't get me my money back...

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Our VTR is currently 77.8% calculated on 2 invalid shipments over 9 orders. We ship roughly 1500 orders per month through Amazon Buy Shipping linked to our Royal Mail account (Large Letter and Small Parcel format). We occasionally use a shipping service outside of Amazon if its a larger order or international.

RM24 and RM48 services purchased through Amazon Buy Shipping used to be included in the VTR rate which was fine as any small problem we had with a shipment was still only a small percentage of the total number of shipments.

It now seems harsh that if 1 or 2 mistakes are made per month over 1500 shipments then these have a huge impact on our VTR just because most of our orders are now exempt from the VTR calculations?

We will aim to reduce any human errors this side but 77.8 isn't a fair representation of the total number of orders we ship without issue.

As a theoretical example of how current VTR is calculated:

If we had 100,000 orders per month and 99,999 were exempt but we had 1 invalid order because shipping was purchased outside of Amazon and the tracking wasn't accepted, this would be picked up on the VTR and give us a score of 0% (0/1) rather than the old system which would be 99,999/100,000 = 99.99%

Surely this is some sort of oversight?

I've tried calling seller support but I've only been able to get scripted website based responses so far!..

So the emails are still being sent, and even when using Buy Shipping. This really has to stop!!

For some reason my posted items are not registring on Amazon. Have marked a couple by hand and will end up doing the rest i suspect ebay,etsy and my website all working fine with it.