Thanks for ALL of the support guys! If you know me, or any of my employees, you know we work REALLY hard for our customers and HATE to fail in someones eyes like this. Even with all these glowing reviews, which REALLY help us to know we are doing things right, something in this thread still pains me....the first post. We really do strive to give everything we can to everyone(online customers, instore customers, repairs, our dive boats, our students, our instructors, our manufacturers, etc), and it sucks when we fail...regardless of how the situation evolved. It's a shame it turned out this way, but it is still the way I would play it out today based on all the info we knew/know.
What can ya do....refocus our attention on the next customer and give them the WOW service they deserve and the excitement that should be paired with our sport!
Thanks for the comments here and on Yelp. Myself and my staff REALLY appreciate it. We work hard for our divers and dive community everyday, and seeing all these comments make all the day to day headaches worthwhile!
As for fraud...
Since this thread was created:
We have had 14 attempted fraudulent orders. Most never make it past round one auto filters as they are obvious, others get caught later. You should see some of the Photo IDs we get from people that are completely photoshopped and fake. It's pretty funny sometimes. I would love to share some of them, but I don't want the lurking thieves to get smart. There stupidity is what we prey on to catch them and sniff them out. These aren't the typical ones like Lapenta talked about, those are just a joke. Most of these that get past the autoflags are pretty sophisticated and require some care to figure out.
One check we USED to do, which was bullet proof...We would run a small charge on someones account, a random charge on their card (before the transaction was ran). We would ask them to verify the charge by calling their bank or logging into their online bank. For about 3 years, this was flawless....as of about a year ago, it has not been working, and we have seen more and more people get thru it. Kinda strange what a crook can figure out. Somehow they either fooled the bank when the called in to check, hacked into a computer and stole the bank login info, are just lied to the bank when they did the charge back. When this did stop people, we would get calls all the time... "Who are you, and why did you run a charge for $12.67 on my account." After telling them, they realized their account was hacked, and only learned because of us. We saved people we never met thousands of dollars and headaches and they were always very appreciative.
As someone said, WE are the only ones that lose in a situation like this. We lose the product, and the bank takes the money back. This is why we are very cautious. We apologize, but we have no choice. It wastes our time, money, and resources to do it, but certain orders have to have more attention.
Thanks again for ALL of the kind words. It's rewarding to know that so many people think of a small dive shop in Illinois, in such high regard!