Fighting back when you’re deceived
OPINION: It’s grim to be in a fight with traders who think they can misrepresent goods, and then get you to accept something different after you’ve paid.
It’s even worse when a trader barefacedly refuses to acknowledge there’s a problem, and forces you to take legal action.
I bought a secondhand iPhone 8 64GB from an established online trader this week, a black one.
When I strolled over to pick it up from the business, I was told they didn’t have the black one, but they did have a nice white one they had set aside specially for me.
Not the end of the world, but a bit presumptuous, I thought.
I’d paid for the black phone, which they said they had, and now they were pulling a switch. Did they even have the black phone when I paid online?
Slightly irritated, I accepted the switch with a shrug of my shoulders. How imageconscious can you be with an old phone, which I won’t be pulling out at work?
Had I insisted on what I paid for, the Consumer Guarantees Act would have required the business to give me my money back, or give me what I paid for, though I’d have had to wait.
Minor irritations in commerce like this are all-too common, but sometimes traders, and private sellers, are downright barefaced in their apparent belief they can get away with far worse stuff than this.
A case came before the Disputes Tribunal last year, which is a salutary tale that helpfully sets out your rights when faced with misrepresentation by a private seller.
In the case a chap bought an electric scooter on TradeMe.
It had a 60V motor, the trader said on their listing. Only, it didn’t. It had a 52V motor.
When the buyer got the scooter, he
GOLDEN RULES:
■ Hold traders and sellers to account
■ Know your rights
■ The Disputes Tribunal exists to hold smalltime dodgy dealers to account
discovered the misrepresentation, but the trader simply refused to do the decent thing.
Instead, he forced the buyer to take him to the Disputes Tribunal, which handles minor civil claims, further wasting the buyer’s time.
The trader told the tribunal it had all been a cut-and-paste mistake, saying he had copied the description of the scooter from another website in error.
With a bare-faced cheek, the seller actually argued that the buyer should have spotted his mistake. Happily, this rather self-serving argument was thrown out by the tribunal.
As the sale was a private sale, the Consumer Guarantees Act did not apply. That forces businesses not to deceive customers.
But private sales are still covered by the Contract and Commercial Law Act.
Under that act, a seller who misrepresents something they are selling, even innocently, must pay damages to a buyer they have duped.
The tribunal therefore ordered the seller to pay $495 in damages, as an equivalent 52V electric scooter would have cost $1155.
I’d argue that was a poor outcome for the buyer, and a win for the seller, who I think lacked a moral compass.
That seller got to offload the scooter to someone who didn’t want it, and got the use of $495 of the buyer’s money for a few months. I hope the buyer left the seller a rotten review, and complained to TradeMe.
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