I ordered a carton of Gauloises Caporals from cigarettepurchase.com on May 15, 2013. As instructed to do when I placed the order, I sent the payment for this order, $26.50 US, by Western Union wire transfer on May 23, 2013. I was charged $5.00 by Western Union for this service. I was then informed in a May 24, 2013 email from Western Union that the recipient to whom I had sent the money had, in fact, picked up the money for the order on that date.
For the next week, I checked the order status on the website, but it never moved off of "pending." I then sent a minimum of 5 emails to the company to find out what was going on with the order, several through their website contact form, a few as replies to the email I received when I placed the order, and one to the president of the company, Guobing Wang, whose email address is listed on the website. Every one of these emails was ignored, and I never received a response to any of them.
After another week passed, I lodged complaints with Western Union and the Federal Trade Commission due to the fact that I had not received my order, the order status on the website never changed, and all of my attempts to get information about the order were ignored.
After doing some research, I discovered that this website is hosted by singlehop.com, a webhost out of Chicago, so I sent an email to their abuse department. At first, they tried to say they did not host cigarettepurchase.com, but I sent them proof taht the IP address of the website, 184.154.0.44, is, in fact, one of a block of IP addresses owned by them. They then admitted they did host the site, that there was nothing they could do about it, and that they forwarded my complaint to their client, Guobing Wang.
I also discovered that Wang has set up a number of other fraudulent websites to assist him in swindling unsuspecting consumers out of their cash - internationaltobaccoonline, unitedstatescigarettes.com, cheapcigarettesoutlet.com, and t-shirtscustom.com. It's possible there are even more. In addition, I found a number of complaints filed at other websites about others whom Wang has ripped off through these sites.
Wang is a common thief who is duping people into sending him money and then not filling the orders. He claims to have warehouses in several diffferent countries, including one in New York City, but this claim is a lie; he has no warehouses, and he has no product he can ship to anyone. To add insult to injury, the company hosting his websites, singlehop.com, say they will not shut his fraudulent websites down without a court order.