Never received a Pandora nor a refund


Vegetablen

Still Fresh
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Aug 30, 2015
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4
Back when the Pandora was originally announced, around 2008 or so I placed an order and payed in full for a Pandora. I waited eagerly throughout the next couple years or so as shipments were delayed repeatedly, until finally units were being shipped to customers. I waited until 2011 when many had received theirs, yet I had not, and emailed the sales team for a refund. A few months later when they responded, they confirmed they'd cancelled my order and would send a refund by one of several methods, and I requested by bank transfer. Come 2015 and I still haven't received that refund.

How can I get my money back?
 
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Mod Edit: Don't post your order number, just incase of abuse...

Your best bet is to contact EvilDragon and see what your options are, send your order number in a private chat or email.
 
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What's your order number?
Don't tell people to do that, not everyone gets old forum Memes.
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Whilst this situation surely sucks, and there are no winners with this sort of issue and blah blah blah...

...four years is a looong time between "Oh good, I'm getting my refund" to "Hey, wait a second... where's my refund?"

Good luck with your enquiry.  I hope ED can help you out somehow.
 
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Worse case Ed can discount  a Pyra for you. Sorry about your unfortunate situation :(
 
I think at this point a new handheld is the last of my priorities, but I appreciate the offer.

Thanks for the help, everyone. At least now I won't be wondering whatever happened to the order I'd placed all those years ago.
 
So basically because I ordered through Craig the money is gone forever?
The hard answer to this is: Yep. Craig up-and-went with your (and several others') monies. That sucks.

The somewhat more compassionate answer follows up the above with: ...but this community, and ED in particular, is full of goodness and will try to make your payment count towards something else, at least, in order to soften the blow. Even though he has no legal obligation to do so. Bless his little dragon heart.

But yes. That's about it, really.
 
Well, Craigs company is officially dissolved as no one complained about that.

The company is non-existant, so sadly there's no way to grab the money.
 
Actually, that's not true.

I complained. Lots of times. I explained and showed different agencies the situation and all the paperwork I could get. But they were powerless. Basically, OP LTD just told them "we don't have any money", and all the agencies just lost interest there. That, and maybe they were just unwilling to do anything as it was a case of a relatively small sum (~300€). Same rule applies as in real life: only the big fish matter.

The only way I could have done anything was by a small claims court. From abroad. IIRC, that would have cost 80€. And because OP LTD didn't have any money, I wouldn't have gotten anything back, even when the court would have concluded I indeed were right. I think one of the agencies even confirmed that. During that time, I also had to finish up on my Master's thesis. I tried to explain this to them, and asked for a time-extension (you had to present on fixed time periods some solid evidence that you are still actively pursuing on collecting your receivables). They didn't comply. So I gave up. I normally would have fought to the very end just for the principle (and that's indeed the only thing that I could possibly have gotten out of it), but I valued graduation more than wasting time fighting a war where the only outcome was to lose even more money.

So please, don't say no one complained. We did (<-- I'm assuming I wasn't the only one, as the dissolvement went a few months further after I quit). But because of how the system is rigged, there simply was nothing to be done.

On a side note, here's a little tip for UK people thinking of starting a company:
Make it a limited company, and when the business goes bad, just tell that you're out of money. Assuming you don't mess with the big boys, you're golden.
 
Lots of people complained here but like you didn't complain officially because they knew it wouldn't be worth their time, money or effort.

So in theory nobody did complain.
 
Yeah, complaining on here didn't/doesn't count. People should have gone to a consumers complaints board instead. Or someone should have filed a lawsuit against Craig.
 
Exactly. A company cannot be dissolved if it has still liabilities. But if the UK government (or whoever handles companies in UK) doesn't receive official complaints, nothing happens and it can be shutdown after a certain period (which is what happened).
 
I contacted Companies House, ECC and Insolvency Service.

Companies House is the agency that is able to postpone the dissolvency. The strike-off letter was sent on November 2013. By default, the original dissolvency would have happened in February 2014. But it didn't. Because people kept objecting to it, it was postponed for a full year. The last letter I sent to the CH was on September 2014.

Here's a direct quote from Finnish ECC from one of the emails:
"I have now consulted England's ECC and they've gotten a response from OpenPandora, stating they have no funds left. ECC UK won't take the matter into their hands, as there's nothing else to be done besides that you can yourself object to the “strike-off”-status or take the matter forward via courts. Additional information with regards to the court process can be found here:
http://www.ecc.fi/fi-FI/oikeudenkaynti/eurooppalainen-vahaisia-vaatimuksia-koskeva-menettely/
But if the company is indeed without funds, the court procedure won't help you to get your money back."

But I still kept going on, looking for alternative ways to proceed. One of those was the Insolvency Service, which can investigate the companies that are suspected of "serious misconduct, fraud or sharp practice in the way a company operates". I gave every bit of info and evidence I could get a hold on. And the last I heard from Insolvency Service, in August 2014:
"We will be considering your complaint and will then decide whether to carry out a formal investigation. As part of that consideration we may contact you to seek more information."

They never contacted again. And as I didn't have any further evidence for Companies House (and they wouldn't (and probably legally can't) agree to postpone the deadline), they continued with the dissolvency. Apparently someone else went a little further, if there are still records of the company in February 2015.

Oh, and as a side note: as far as I know, OP LTD never objected or denied the validity of the claims. They simply stated they were out of funds.
 
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