Won chargeback but now being threatened with court

bris

Hannahc1990x said:

Why would I keep a sofa for months that I couldn’t sit on? 

Because you became an "involuntary bailee" you disposed of an item that didn't belong to you.

There is a process that you needed to go through.

born_again

Undervalued said:

Manxman_in_exile said:

Hannah  -  they did do wrong, yes, but that was corrected when you got paid the chargeback.  The sofa then belonged to the trader and should have been returned to them.  Or at least you should have made arrangements for them to collect it at their cost.  By not doing so you have technically done wrong.  But if your bank didn't explain that to you, you wouldn't know.

I'm not arguing with you or telling you off - I'm telling you what I think your legal position is.
 
Do as @the_lunatic_is_in_my_head suggests...

Maybe but it is not the bank's job to give legal advice. 

The bank is obliged to operate within the law, to abide by banking regulations and the terms of their agreement with the customer.

If the customer requests and has a right to a chargeback, under the terms of their account. it is the banks job to implement it. It is not their role to make a judgement on the wisdom of the customer's decision.

Bank staff are not allowed to give legal advice. As they are not trained to do so. So you have to choose your words very carefully at times, & hope customer gets the gist of what you might be saying 🤦‍♀️

All bank can do is go via Visa/Mastercard regulations on card purchases.

Bank can refuse to action a chargeback, if the evidence is not provided to back up a chargeback, as required.

So in a situation like this. Best advise would be that a retailer has 6 years to chase return of goods if chargeback is not contested & refund remains on customers account.

pinkshoes

What you should have done is put IN WRITING that you are rejecting the sofa due to it not being fit for purpose and that they NEED TO COLLECT IT...

You now need to keep a record of every time you tried to phone them, along with a record of the phone call you made to them. You could argue that you told them in the phone call that they needed to collect it (did you????) but as they refused to do this, you had no other choice but to get rid of it as it was taking up a lot of space. 

I assume you have photos of the broken sofa? This will help you hopefully win any court case.

macman

Did you inform them that you would be disposing of it in x days if they did not make arrangements to collect it?

Aylesbury_Duck

macman said:

Did you inform them that you would be disposing of it in x days if they did not make arrangements to collect it?

Judging by OP's previous replies, I think we can guess the answer to that.

tightauldgit

Regardless of the ins and outs of what you should have done at the time a threat of being taken to court is not the same thing as actually being taken to court so I would say Plan A is to sit tight and wait and see if they actually do take you to court - at a guess I'd say 80% chance they don't for the sake of a few hundred quid. If you want to then yes write back to them stating your position and that you will defend any court action against you. 

If it does come to court then I hope you have at least some evidence that the sofa was faulty - photos etc - before you disposed of it. Even if it came to it and you lost a court case then what would be their loss? What's the value of a broken sofa less their costs of collecting it?

It sounds like they are just trying to bully you. So I wouldn't worry too much about it for now. 

Le_Kirk

First step in instigating a small claims claim is to send a Letter before/of Claim; have you received such?

tightauldgit

Regardless of the ins and outs of what you should have done at the time a threat of being taken to court is not the same thing as actually being taken to court so I would say Plan A is to sit tight and wait and see if they actually do take you to court - at a guess I'd say 80% chance they don't for the sake of a few hundred quid. If you want to then yes write back to them stating your position and that you will defend any court action against you. 

If it does come to court then I hope you have at least some evidence that the sofa was faulty - photos etc - before you disposed of it. Even if it came to it and you lost a court case then what would be their loss? What's the value of a broken sofa less their costs of collecting it?

It sounds like they are just trying to bully you. So I wouldn't worry too much about it for now. 

DullGreyGuy

Hannahc1990x said:

Alderbank said:

Manxman_in_exile said:

After you were refunded and the trader failed to challenge it, I think ownership of the sofa reverted to the trader and you should have made arrangements with them for them to collect it.

I don't see that. I think chargeback is just about payment.

1. The sale is completed, the OP has paid for the sofa and title has been transferred from the shop to OP.
2. Later, the merchant bank comes to the shop's premises, opens the till, takes that sum out and gives it to the OP. The bank doesn't even want to see the sofa.
3. The position now is that the shop has supplied the goods but has not received the payment agreed by contract. They can sue the OP for that payment which was agreed but has not been made.

Ok so what about this side as well. 

Say they take me to court and they win. Then I’m in the same original position of no money and technically no goods as the goods were defective and not fit For purpose. So it’s consistently a lose lose situation for me. 

But it was your choice to deprive yourself of the goods and yes if you lose in court its a loss

If you win in court then the counterparty loses because they have no money and no goods and so its not a lose lose situation. 

Your challenge is presumably you didnt bother getting an expert report on the item before decided to dispose of it? In which case it may be difficult to prove both that the item was defective and secondly it was unrepairable. It may well be the judge decides it was defective but repairable and so orders that you have to repay the difference between what the repair would have cost and what the sofa cost... the fact you cannot use that money to repair the sofa is an issue of your own creation. Similarly they may decide it was fair for you to get a full refund but the merchant should have gotten the sofa back which could have been repaired and resold and so you owe them the value of the damaged item (which has a similar net effect). 

Bottom line, if you have goods you havent paid for you cannot just throw them away

Hannahc1990x

I did send them an email back in March asking them to come and collect the sofa to which this was ignored. I have all the photos of the sofa. I didn’t record the phone call but I will have it in my phone records that I contacted them. 

They are only interested in the sofa now that I have my money back. They said in their first email to me back in March that they would have to speak to the manufacturers first but that plus their first email of asking for photos is the only contact they ever made. 

As some of you have said, what are they going to do with a broken sofa? They even said to me they ship out hundreds of them a month and they don’t care about the money. 

My bank did say a few weeks before I won the charge back that they’d had a response but they wouldn’t tell me what was said and have still refused to tell me what was said. For all I know their response could have been we will have the sofa back.