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UK Retailer Mistakenly Sends PS Vitas, Threatens Legal Action To Get Them Back
New submitter Retron writes "The BBC brings news that British retailer Zavvi mistakenly sent out PlayStation Vitas to people who had preordered a game called Tearaway. The company is now threatening legal action against those who have kept theirs despite a request to return them. It's unclear whether the Distance Selling Act protects consumers who have mistakenly been sent an expensive item, and forums such as Eurogamer seem divided on the issue."
No idea either - however, something close happened to me a few years ago.
I ordered an e-ink ebook reader (for 200+ euros) as well as a cover (~20 euros) for the same. A few days later, package arrives: there were two ebook readers in it, no cover at all. I said to myself "lucky ! they made a mistake", did not tell the online store they did (it was a large, national one - I have no guilt over this), and proceeded to order two covers on the same store for the two readers I now possessed.
A few days later, package arrives, contains two other ebook readers. At that point I thought "what the hell", and ordered four covers, one for each of the readers, half expecting four new readers to arrive. This time however, they had fixed the mistake, and I received the product I ordered - the four covers. At that point, me and my flatmates (there were four of us) each had a reader and a cover to go with it anyway.
Frankly, I expected them to at least contact us or use legal action, but the only thing that happened is that we received a phone call with a weird guy asking us "did you order something online recently ?". We simply asked who he was and he answered "I can't tell you that", at which point we simply hung up. Never heard from them again.
This suggests to me that since they made the mistake, they weren't allowed to try and get the products back - I could be wrong though, and I was overseas from said online store at the time, so they may simply have considered that legal action in another country would simply cost them too much.
Several years ago the company I worked for ordered 2 Dell workstations. A few days later they both came in, but the service tags didn't match the ones we ordered. In fact, they were just numbers. Weird. Whatever. The next day two identical workstations showed up with the original correct service tags. I called our service rep and explained that they had over-shipped the machines, plus the weirdness with the Service Tags that didn't actually look like legit numbers. It took me nearly two weeks to return 2 PC's that Dell insisted couldn't exist because the service tags weren't valid. Since the tags weren't valid their system couldn't issue an RGA.
My best guess is that someone was stealing systems somehow.
Besides, I see no need to tempt karma.