Complaint Review: Tufshop.com - Signal Hill California

Tufshop, also known as MicroX, Busy Boys (bzboys), PartsPC, and PCRapids has a well documented history of fraud and deception. I have found over 200 complaints against them from verifiably different consumers. The Los Angeles BBB acknowledges that the company does not respond to customer complaints. The usual scam they run isto advertise a product for as much as 20 dollars less than the lowest honest outfit, then when you order it they try to add-on products you don't need in an opt-out fashion - i.e. if you on't pay attention the $45 CPU you thought you were buying goes up to $225 with the inclusion of a fan, thermal grease, copper shim, 3 year warranty, "platinum protection", extra RAM, and other stuff, when ALL YOU WANTED WAS A CPU. Then, if you manage to avoid that pitfall and pay by credit card, they will authorize, but not charge your card for the full amount. Then they will call you and state that the order you placed was for a OEM motherboard, would you like to upgrade to the retail one for $35 extra? If you say no, you will get another call, 2 weeks after you placed the order to let you know there was a problem with credit card verification. Funny, if there was a problem with verification, how was your card authorized to begin with?? If you decide to pay by money order, you are in even more dire straits. They will take 3-5 days after the MO arrives to decide the MO is good before giving you the first phone call mentioned above. If you say no, they ship you a defective motherboard and CPU and then stick you with it as their "terms and conditions" state that they do not accept returns. Period. I am currently researching in the process of beginning a suit against them. I invite everyone who has been a victim of their bait-and-switch or defective product cons to post our own Rip-off Report on this..

I wrote a complaint about this incident to our state's Consumer Protection agency. I then wrote back to Tufshop to tell them that I was complaining about them. At that point, a Neal Armstrong wrote me to say they wanted to resolve the problem and to please contact him. I wrote him and we came to an agreement that I would return the CPU to them, and then they would replace it for me. We agreed to do a replacement with a slightly higher speed unit, with me paying any difference in price. Neal told me as soon as they received the CPU he would email the price and set up a replacement once I agreed to it. Well if it sounds too good to be true...anyway, they received the CPU on 5/20/2002 according to Fedex. Months passed and I heard nothing. So finally I tried emailing Mr. Armstrong to find out if they did in fact receive the CPU, and also of course to find out what in the world is taking them so long to contact me. I got no response to my email, so I tried to call this place. I was unable to reach a human being, and in fact, I was not even allowed to leave a voice mail message, presumably because their voice mail system is full! And this is the outfit that calls themselves Tufshop for "totally user friendly" shop. Unbelievable. So I tried emailing the main customer support email there, and I set the read receipt flag so I would know if it was read. Sure enough, someone read it at 1 in the morning. A couple of days later I got a response, which I will post so that you can see exactly what was said: Hello Ed, After verifying and discussing your problem with Neal and our RMA team, we need to inform you that you will be required to place a new order for the processor on which we will give you 10% discount from our side. This is the best we can offer you as a replacement for the processor is not possible due to the physical damage. Regards, [email protected] ----- Original Message ----- From: Neal To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, August 08, 2002 8:36 PM Subject: FW: RMA, Neal Armstrong, stuff like this Parag, Yes, this is the customer that sent me his processor for replacement and it was burnt up badly. I then sent him an email about this. I told him that once we had received his cpu he could place a new order however, this processor is damaged badly. So if this customer would like another processor he will have to place a new order and let the customer know that we can only give a 10% discount on the new order just to prevent this for becoming a bigger problem than it already is. Please let me know if you have any further questions. Thank you, Neal A. Armstrong Tufshop.com Now, they already knew the CPU was burned, because I had sent it back before, and they had examined it. Nothing changed; it wasn't more burned the second time around than it was the first. They just basically welshed on our agreement. And I don't know this, but judging by how these guys do business, it makes me wonder if they sent it back to AMD, got a credit on it, and now are trying to shaft me. I dunno, but at this point, I wouldn't be surprised. And you really have to wonder, were they EVER going to contact me? It sure seems like they weren't since they made no effort to do so. So, I leave it to you to draw your own conclusions about them and how they do business.