wow guess I have to check out vendors more carefully in future, this is not the only techondig-bashing site
http://forums.cnet.com/5208-7593_102-0.html?hhTest=1&forumID=58&threadID=273339&messageID=2639046
Many years ago I raised a bit of hell for a group of camera stores in Old Orchard Beach, Maine. That area is a favored resort for Canadians, and is populated by a large group of cameras/electronics stores which operate seasonally. Just about every one of them was operated by uncles, cousins, brothers of the same family. And all were extensions of the NYC/Brooklyn genre as seen in the Links provided in this thread.
BAIT and SWITCH operations, big time.
James Tierney was Maine's Attorney General at the time, and a regular customer of my camera store. You may still be able to see Jim on Court TV, he having become the legal advisor(some years ago) for the program.
I complained to Jim about the slime-balls at the Beach. He had Consumer Affairs personnel visit me several times to pick my brain. They arrived looking like they were right the hell "off-the-farm," except for the leather attache cases; and interviewed me at length. Then they'd go to the stores at the Beach, again "off-the-farm," and go shopping. The next visit with me they'd claim amazement at how smooth the culprits are at being multi-lingual and lying right through their eye-teeth.
"We thought that when Jim Tierney gave us your letters of information it was a case of a sorehead small merchant. But the more we got into it the deeper and worse it became as we played the role of the uninformed consumer." A TV station picked up on the A-G's investigation and ran a several day's expose of the culprits.
I was told by Jim that
"We may not be able to shut them down, but we can make them become very uncomfortable because of all the publicity."
Several of the stores moved out and back to NYC
"Primarily because our teenage children feel more comfortable when living in the realm of our religious culture than in this community." Yeah, right!!!
One of the scams was to not ship the telephone orders. When the customer would complain about not having received the ordered merchandise the "friendly voice" would apologize and issue a credit to the customer's credit card. However, the A-G investigation discovered that one store was holding nearly $100,000.00 in credit card "credits" which had never been turned into the credit card issuer(s). That was one of the stores which slipped back into the Big Apple,
after being required to post a bond sufficient to satisfy the credits they'd been "holding."
HR