Money Moral Dilemma: Should I force my friend to replace my £700 camera lens?

crmism

I'm not altogether surprised your so-called friend has dropped you - he's probably so embarrassed that he's trying to wipe the incident from his memory altogether and vainly hoping you'll forget it too.

However, you shouldn't allow matters to rest as they are. The fact is, he's a real scumbag and owes you money.

Whatever you do, don't make the mistake of dropping to his level by using social media to broadcast what you might think of him. Instead, keep it personal and shame him. Visit him or drop him a line to remind him what he did and that he still owes you the cost of replacing the lens; in doing so, make it clear that, every time his name comes up in conversation, you will be telling everyone the truth of the matter and warning them what a deceitful individual he is. Unless you do that, he'll never see sense or compensate you.

You might still have to write it off to experience, but at least you'll know that you've done the decent thing.

EachPenny

pugsydog wrote: »

Do you have any kind of receipt from the camera shop? Maybe call by asking them to look in their paperwork for when it was left with them.

If I understand the full story correctly, the lens wasn't left with a camera shop, the 'friend of a friend' offered to get the repair done via an 'under the counter' type of arrangement. That's a crucial difference compared to the original version posted in the OP. If there is a paper trail then it is unlikely to help the OP very much.

harshitguptaiitr

Just curious -

Do you have any written records, say Facebook messages or texts, where the person admits that they owe you either the money or the camera lens?

Is the friend's mother aware of this incident?

Have you written a formal letter to the friend demanding reasonable compensation?

Pollycat

adibell wrote: »

Hello, I originally posted this question to MSE.

To those calling me stupid for not chasing it up in the first place, kindly keep your fairly useless and obvious opinions to yourself please. I'm well aware it was daft not to chase it up in the first place. Hence why it's a dilemma that I've been living with for years now, duh. I came to MSE for general advice not critique on a mistake I'm well aware I messed up on. I'm aware it's probably been too long to claim and maybe I just chalk it up to life experience, but on the off-chance someone on here has some amazing alternative useful options I hadn't thought of, it seemed worth posting for the sake of £700 - what else can I do?!

The situation transpired like this:
The friend in question was one of my very closest friends, who i'd been in a teenage band with for 10 years, to the point where we'd been very close to making a professional career out of it until 2008 happened and we then went off to uni. i.e. we were pretty darn close.

I met with my friend on our yearly Xmas reunion, and he'd brought along a mate of his from Manchester. His mate was a photographer working for GQ magazine, if I remember rightly, and we got talking about kit. I was looking to get my newly bought second-hand lens (Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM) repaired at the time as it had a minor issue with the focusing ring. This mate of his said that he could get the repair done by his work and he'd just bill it as one of his lenses. His friend seemed trustworthy, and I trusted my friend's judgement (I'M AWARE THIS MAY HAVE BEEN MISTAKE #1 - I don't need opinions on how stupid I was at the time).

The camera lens went over to Manchester for repair, and then a few weeks late, I was told that the lens had been returned to my friend, and was ready for me to come and collect. However, I wasn't able to get over to Manchester for a few weeks. My friend said he'd keep hold of it until I could make it over.

I eventually went over to collect it. He lived with his brother, who was also in the band with us and was a best friend of many years - we stayed friends after all of this. My friend was out at work, but his brother said he'd seen it about the flat just a few days before, as they were preparing to move flat in a week or so. We spent close to two hours looking around the flat, through boxes, bags cupboards etc. We tore the place apart looking for it. Seemingly his brother was convinced it had been there, so I was didn't see any suggestion that it had been stolen/misplaced before arriving back at their flat.

Anyway, we called friend 1 at work, and he was adamant it was in the flat, and he'd be home later to help look for it. I had to leave before he'd be home though, so I ended up leaving feeling very defeated and fed up.

I can't remember exactly how all of the following events happened, but for a while friend 1 claimed that he would find it. He asked me not to report it just yet, as he would get his work lawyers to look into what they could do (i never really learned what he was suggesting by this, but I was young and he was one of my best mates; I trusted him that he was trying to sort it. Again, very obviously a mistake in hindsight, you're not clever for calling me stupid on a forum for this - keep your opinions to yourself unless you have any useful insight as to what he may have been thinking/doing)

Anyway, eventually, after months and months of messages 'any updates on that lens?' and little progress, the replies turned slowly to "I'll pay you for it" and my responses ended up "just wondered, whe ndo you think you'll be able to pay for that lens" and eventually fizzled out and got less and less replies. Eventually radio silence, seemingly disappearing off my facebook, and one time later apparently 'I had issues with facebook, I've not blocked you' - yet he's still a friend on my other friends' accounts (yes, I'm fully aware he blocked me, I'm not naive enough to believe that he hadn't. At this kind of point, it became a dilemma, as I no longer believed he was a friend, and that this had officially driven us apart, but I still had no answers, repayment, lens or crime number).

I kind of unwillingly put it down to experience, and it was really sad. Not only was it £700 value gone, it was a camera lens I'd been wanting for a long long time and finally had - for about a month.

However, I randomly heard through my mum talking to his mum about a year ago that friend 1 had actually been having some financial difficulties a couple of years previously, corresponding to roughly the time this all might have happened. I messaged him (or called, can't remember without checking back) to confront about this. I received an angry response saying how it was none of my business, and it wasn't his mum's business to be telling my mum about it. We'd officially now become not friends, and I felt that bridges were officially burned, and I had no more options allowing me to ask him about it.

Since then, I've not chased, because I had no idea what else to ask, who to ask about it (I didn't want to drive away his brother too, or his mum, as they really were good family friends. His brother and I drifted apart anyway other than meeting for a drink once or twice in the last year, though their mum is still good friends with mine).

However, I thought maybe there's someone out there with a great idea, so thought I might as well post to MSE's Money Dilemmas - what harm is there in doing that (other than having to bear pig ignorant forum trolls).

So here we are. Thoughts? Useful suggestions? I've lost financial value, a hobby item but worst, a lifelong friend. I'd appreciate people being helpful please.

EachPenny wrote: »

Perhaps you can appreciate that many people reading the original dilemma have assumed there probably isn't a real person behind it, and therefore comments made in response are not personal about you, but made in response to what might seem like far-fetched scenario offered up for discussion by MSE.

Therefore getting snarky with people who have commented on what seems like a random dilemma is a little unfair.

Your full story paints a very different picture to the one presented in the original post. Had you come onto the site in person with the full story then you'd have got a far more helpful reaction in the first place - and I don't mean that as criticism of you, just explaining why some people would comment differently on a 'story' in comparison to someone's genuine problem.

As for the problem, I'm really not sure there is anything you can do which will make the situation better. You could try the SC route, but how will you prove that the friend didn't give the lens back? Even if you still have texts and emails from the friend saying he's looking for it, what's to stop him telling the court that the lens was found and returned to you? At the end of the day it could be a case of your word against his, he could even produce a witness to confirm that the lens was given back. That of course would be perjury, but how would you prove it? You couldn't produce a witness to confirm the lens was never given back.

I agree with the bit in bold.

I think MSE have done you a disservice in posting your dilemma as they did.

You would most certainly have had different responses if

1. it hadn't been posted as a MMD
2. posters had the full story right at the beginning instead of a couple of lines
3. it had been posted on a different board i.e. not Discussion Time. If you take a look at the other threads on DT, you'd probably agree.

Wake_up_call

Out of interest, how far back you go in a small claims case?

Rex_Mundi

Wake_up_call wrote: »

Out of interest, how far back you go in a small claims case?

https://www.compactlaw.co.uk/free-legal-information/small-claims-court/time-limits.html

Bellisima

You really can’t trust anyone to be honest. You either forget it or pursue him in the courts. My sister had a chap do work on her house - he was recommended. by our brother and nephew. He couldn’t finish the job and said he would return, and she paid him the full amount, big mistake. She never saw him again, despite phone calls to him. He was well known locally and everyone said he was a nice lad and usually reliable blah blah. My sister tried to find where he lived but no one supposedly knew. Her husband eventually shamed him on Facebook, calling him an thief. It did the trick and he posted the money back through her letterbox. I’m only saying this as everyone said he was really nice, really reliable chap, but he clearly wasn’t. She also later found out he had a gambling problem.

adibell

Hi all,

Thank you for some very good replies!

Hopefully many have realised that I didn't post my own thread as I didn't realise the money dilemmas was primarily a forum activity - I just emailed in off the back of the MSE newsletter. I was surprised to see my email in the MSE newsletter and immediately signed up to the forums for the first time to see what people's responses were. I sent an email about the same length as previous MSE Money Dilemmas so that it would fit on the MSE newsletter, but perhaps I should have sent the full story so that it would have been posted on the forum in full - anyway, I followed up with the full story, so lets continue from there...

Some really good points have been raised about how it will be my word against his, so it seems as though I'm probably stuck. As others have suggested, I might be able to chase the photographer person and see if there's any proof of the camera lens going in for repair. However, as he's a friend of the original friend, it's likely that if there's any wrongdoing, he may be involved. Who knows. He probably doesn't even work there any more, so it's likely I won't be able to get any proof of repair anyway, but it's worth a check.

Anyway, I looked back over the messages between me and Friend 1....
They show that I went to collect the lens in May 2014. Between then and January 2015, I text messaged 6 times, asking if he had found the lens. He did not reply to any. I can;t see any messages that were also sent via facebook, as he doesn't appear to exist to me any more (though he definitely does as I saw his profile on my dad's facebook when I was home for mas - which was what coaxed me to email in to MSE about all this).

When he finally replied, he claimed 'I think it got thrown out by mistake when I was clearing loads of old junk out of the old apartment. I'll send you some money for it im sorry. You'll have to give me sometime though because I'm pretty skint from christmas'. To this I said fair enough, I understand, but then made it clear that I'd been chasing for quite some time with no response, why didn't he just let me make the claim in the first place? Or explain any of this before? I received no reply. And then received no reply to any messages over the following few months asking for an update. I also messaged in April 2015 explaining how I'd noticed he had blocked me on facebook,- I could still see that he was being tagged in his brother's photos, but it wouldn;t allow me to click onto his profile (I was blocked). No reply. No nothing until we saw each other that Christmas for a reunion. I had organised it with his brother, and he was there. I didn't mention the lens on the night, as that was the very awkward conversation to have and would certainly have ruined a friendly reunion.

I received a text from him on my Birthday in May 2016, then in October 2016, a random message saying he'd bumped into someone we knew from school. I fairly quickly turned back round to "Found my camera lens yet?" which he shrugged off and said no idea, then continued with smalltalk which I ignored. I then told him that I was upset about the lens still and then mentioned about how his mum had mentioned his financial difficulties, to which he went very defensive (Starting with "Jesus Christ dude don't you dare") and said that it was unrelated to when the lens went missing, and then told me how he was going to deal with his mum for telling me that. I replied telling him that I have every right to be suspicious following his behaviour after it disappeared, and that because of him stalling, asking me not to report it etc, I was now powerless. I told him that I want the money back, and that If the lens was stolen, I should report it to the police.

I never got a reply, and haven't heard anything from him since.

Quizzical_Squirrel wrote: »

I don't believe these MSE dilemmas either but if the 'friend' was a photographer himself and has posted images online that you can access, it's possible you might be able to check for your lens serial number in his EXIF data.

Great thought about the EXIF data- long shot but I will definitely have a look into it!!

Maat

It's clearly still bothering you but I don't think your ex-friend will give you the money without being forced into it. I realise you're having trouble letting this go so it could be worthwhile looking into what evidence you have that your ex-friend had responsibility for the lens and what instructions you may have given him regarding its collection. Basically, do you have enough to go to a court with? At a small claims court you'd need to be able to give reasonable evidence (even text messages from the time would help, especially if your ex-friend sent one telling you he'd pay the £700). If you have such evidence you could take it to court. If not then you're going to have to find a way to let this go. Would you really want to spend another three years feeling resentful? Good luck whatever you decide.

Jackmydad

Quizzical_Squirrel wrote: »

I don't believe these MSE dilemmas either (edit - sorry, I now realize it's not an MSE post!)

If the friend is a photographer himself and has posted images online that you can access, it's possible you might be able to check for your lens serial number in his EXIF data.

Good point this. Could well find who has the lens.
I don't believe it's been "lost"
Might be worth looking at this as well
https://www.lenstag.com/