I elected to purchase a gift basket which was made of chocolate flowers for an aunt who was recovering from breast cancer. She is located in Cali, Colombia and I am located in the USA. Therefore, I couldn't go through normal chanels to purchase a gift for her and I didn't want to ask a local family member becasue I really wanted the gift basket to be a surprise. So I paid $140 dollars without reading reviews because the website looked legitimate. Two days after the schedule delivery date a small tin can about the size of my hand arrived with a worn looking cheap stuffed bear and a bag of Snickers. The original product description stated that the chocolate flowers were going to be "European Chocolates" but I don't think Snickers falls into that definition.
I immediately tried calling the customer service number but ended up being placed on some kind of automatic hold and then the line hungup after about 10 minutes. So I tried the chat method. Again, this didn't work, nobody responded to me. So I sent an email to the customer service email address listed.
The next day I received the following email:
Dear Customer,
Thank you for placing the order with us.
This is to inform you that the provided address of your recipient is incomplete,also we tried calling recipient but there was no response, hence we request you to provide the correct details so that your order will be processed for delivery.
Awaiting for your earliest response.
Regards,
Rony
Now, how is this email even legitimate if the recipient actually did recieve something? So I responded back with a lengthy email stating that I was upset with the service and wanted my money back and that this company appeared to be a scam. I still haven't heard back from "Rony".
So I took a chance and called the "415" number again the next day and someone named "Matai" answered the phone saying how sorry he was for the inconvenience and he was going to give it "very high priority". I asked him what state Gifting Inc was incorporated in and he couldn't tell me. All he could say was that it was a US based company. I asked to speak to his manager and/or accounting department to get my money back. He said that they were not around and he couldn't transfer my call.
I proceeding to post a picture of what was received versus what was ordered on Giftsnideas facebook and google + pages to warn others of the scam and was horrified to see the hundres of other people posting reviews of being scammed!