I purchased a K32 black ghw from Only Authentics a few years ago and stupidly paid via bank transfer. I even spoke with the owner, Virgil, over the phone before buying it. I can’t remember why I paid this way. Maybe he had agreed to reduce the price by a couple of hundred dollars or something or maybe he just didn’t take PP or CC then. The package arrived and it turned out to be a K35 with a very strong undisclosed musty odor.
I contacted him immediately and the first thing he said was, “oh you can’t even tell the difference they’re practically the same, what’s 3 cm”, suggesting that I was overreacting and that I should just accept the 35. He wasn’t even surprised by the error and he didn’t doubt me at all. I had to send him pictures of it next to an actual K32 to show him how different they were and that he wasn’t fooling me. I don’t think I even bothered to mention the odor at this point bc it was just the wrong bag altogether, but in hindsight I probably should have just to make sure I got all the issues with it “documented”.
I told him I was shipping it back asap and he could either send me the 32 or give me a refund. He seemed really hesitant to resolve the situation even though he acknowledged it was a 35 right away. He wanted me to just keep it. He also wasn’t interested in getting it back. I insisted bc I didn’t want to keep such a high value item that wasn’t what I purchased.
He ended up telling me he didn’t have the money anymore (it couldn’t have been more than 2-3 days since I had paid him) and he had to get back to me about a resolution. I went straight to FedEx and shipped it back the same hour, at my own expense, and suddenly Virgil was not as easy to get in touch with anymore.
After a month he finally offered to “sell it for me” and give me the refund when it sells (bc he never actually had the 32, the 35 was just listed with an error). This is the part where I just knew I had been bamboozled. This man sent me the wrong Kelly and then makes me feel like he’s doing me a favor by selling it “for me” to give me my money back? Jesus.
I reluctantly, and with great difficulty, negotiated a monthly 1K payment plan for my refund until the Kelly sold.
A few days later, he relisted the Kelly as a 32 again (with no mention of the odor still). I called him out on it and told him to fix it, which he did after a few days, but he never added the odor to its description. It never sold. Could it be that he couldn’t sell the 35 for a long time so he had knowingly mislabeled it 32 all along? Something about the way he was so unbothered by sending me the wrong Kelly and then the way he tried to gaslight me into keeping it really makes me wonder this.
Not surprisingly, I had to chase him down for the 1K every single month to the very end. It was exhausting. Sometimes he would only send me $500. He also skipped payments a few months here and there, which I could do absolutely nothing about except continue to be nice to him so that he wouldn’t completely disappear on me with my money, and each time he gave me a sob story about business being down or health issues, and then the robbery at one of his stores happened (I hate to say it but sometimes what goes around comes around?).
Every time I sent him a payment reminder he would also lecture me about people starving and dying all over the world and say things like “don’t worry, I’ll get it to you soon, there are worse things in the world and we should be grateful”. All I would have politely said was, “hey Virgil, it’s now x date, and I haven’t received this months payment yet, please send.”
It took me almost 2 years to get my money back (without interest or that return shipping expense). We remained friendly and polite the whole time, which I did appreciate, but the man did not do business in good faith with me. His Kelly never sold while he was paying me back. How does a black ghw Kelly not sell for years though? Not sure what happened to it after all this.