People that are trying to get a refund from Digital Dream Labs, be it for the still missing Vector 2.0s or the vaporhardware Butter Robot (that most probably will never see the light of day) are now faced with a new try by them to prevent that:
They now claim customers have to set up an account with bill.com to get their money back.
There are multiple problems with this:
First: bill.com only is availabe for USA customers, they do not deal with customers from other countries. That was confirmed by one customer in a a chat with bill.com support.
Second: Because of data protection and privacy protection laws it is illegal in many countries to try to force customers to give their data to a third party company without the need to do so. I do not know the according laws in the USA, but my guess is that it’s not that easy.
And there is no need for that. DDL could just refund the same way they were paid. Of course that would mean processing the refunds themselves and after they did shut down almost all of their operations (repair shops, OSKR rollouts, development on Escape Pod or OSKR) they most probably do not have the staff for this anymore. Because there is no money left to pay staff?
Payback via PayPal may be difficult, there were reports of problems with PayPal in the past. It is a good guess to assume that PayPal got so many customer complaints about DDL they suspended their account. And maybe other credit card companies did the same.
Karma is a bitch. 🙂
But my guess is that this bill.com stunt is just another try to circumvent the need to give people their money back.
Meanwhile the Vector 2.0s that reached Rotterdam in early january according to DDL are nowhere to be seen and no further statements on that – and famous members of the Vector community are kicked from the official Facebook group for just asking when their Vecto 2.0 will arrive. No professional company with nothing to hide would have the need to resort to hostile actions against their customers like these.