Review Report Review
Extortion, Merchant Violations and Misinformation?

Mark Biebrich Submitted this review about Magic Carpet Auto Transport
Review made Live: 9/4/2008 1:30:00 PM
Jacquie was very friendly but it was pretty obvious that even though I felt I had done my due diligence by asking her plenty of questions before hand her answers were often incorrect. I explained to her that my car was being shipped to a very remote location in North Dakota, “Village” was the term I used to describe it. I thought it might be had for them to find a driver but she assured me that it would not be a problem.

So days go by and they can’t find a driver, and we are already into the “well if you want to pay more it will be easier to find a driver”. Jacquie informs me that she is going to reduce her fee to improve the drivers price but this doesn’t work. Again I get excuses like “The drivers are being really picky” and so on and so forth and if I just give them more money they it will make it easier to find a driver. So I gave them more money and that didn’t help either.

So I gave up, Jacquie was really understanding about this but this part is my biggest grief. Originally it was only going to take a “couple” days to refund my money, then a couple days later when I really pushed the issue it was actually up to 30 days. They could take my money within minutes but cant return it for a month?

At this point I thought it was a good time to post a review here and although it was negative it was nicer than this one. Within an hour I get a phone call from Jacquie and she essentially begged and pleaded with me to take the review down. She told me that it would negatively affect her job if I didn’t remove it and implied that they would probably only give me my money back if I took down the negative review. Then it was “we don’t actually have to give you your money back for 90 days which I had already spoken to Mastercard about and I informed Jacquie that was incorrect and it had to be refunded within 30 days.

At first I didn’t remove my review because it was accurate and fair and Jaquie assured me that I would have my refund by Friday. So Friday comes and goes and still nothing, I waited until after the weekend to follow up and this is what I get back from Jacquie

“To be totally honest, they have been checking on that transportreviews.com. I know that it would be wrong to completely take it down, but for your benefit, if you could remove it for now, and by all means put it back up after you recieve your money. I apologize greatly for this. It is getting ridiculous. But if you could just take it down for now. I will make sure they see that, and push the issue of you getting your money back.”

As you can see, they don’t want to give me my money back unless I remove my review so I have Transport Reviews remove the review and I let Magic Carpet know.

So for weeks after this I would call or email every few days and it was always one excuse after another and I would always get a promise to have my money refunded by Friday and Friday would come and go with no refund. Finally after more than a month of bugging them they finally refunded my money.

I would also like to note that the Magic Carpet 3% surcharge for using a credit card is in violation of MasterCard’s and Visa’s merchant agreement. I spoke with MasterCard to verify this and I also took the time to fill out the form MasterCard has to report this sort of thing, available here (http://www.mastercard.com/us/personal/en/contactus/merchantviolations.html) From what I understand this is also a violation of the Visa merchant agreement but I don’t know where to speak with them about that.

If you would like more information on merchant violations this is a good place to start. http://consumerist.com/consumer/csr/mega-update-requiring-minimum-credit-card-purchases-is-a-violation-168646.php

I think the company by the end if I understood correctly had reduced their fee down to $125 all together but that if they really wanted to stand behind their word they should have put it down to $0. If that worked they would have made nothing and had a happy customer, instead they have made nothing and have an annoyed customer.
Shipment Details
Origin State:
Colorado
Pickup:
Never
Destination State:
North Dakota
Delivery:
Never
Customer Service
Honesty:
Knowlegeable:
Promptness:
Customer Service:
Review Details
Quote or Order Id:
210089
Quote or Order Cost:
$869