Sports Direct and Click & Collect

Go back to the shop and demand that they show you the CCTV of you collecting the goods and see what they say.

Given what you say, have you raised a disputed transaction with your card provider?

eskbanker wrote: »

I'd agree that the root cause is probably some sort of admin error or human carelessness, but that wouldn't constitute fraud, which is all about intentional deception! The F word frequently gets bandied about unnecessarily on here and is rarely helpful....

If someone else has used (without the OP's authority) the OPs bank or credit card, bank book, passport, driving licence, or utility bill for their own personal gain, namely the goods ordered and paid for by the OP, that would indeed be fraud by false representation contrary to S2 of the Fraud Act 2006.

What is rather strange is that whoever collected the goods also knew that the OP ordered goods to be collected from a particular store and when those goods would be available for collection. Perhaps the perpetrator also has acces to the OP's email account?

faisalpak wrote: »

Yes, have raised a dispute with Card provider but what are the chances of success? With whom is the burden of proof?

Before the matter comes to a hearing, the judge will order disclosure.
So whatever evidence the supplier is hoping to rely upon to defend this claim will need to be disclosed. Often, when ID is requested (other than only for proof age) the supplier will take a note of something specific relating to the ID, such as a card number, a drivers number or the account number of the utility bill.

If those match with you, it would, on the balance of probablilty and in the absence of any contrary evidence, suggest that it was your ID that was indeed used.

If the store has CCTV, then that could also be used to assist in proving the goods were handed over. So far, Customer Services would have no idea what you look like, so there would be no reason to deliberately withold such footage from you .

You should ask to review footage from the store. Perhaps if you report the apparent fraud to police, they could obtain the footage (as they would be interested to see if they could identify the perpetrator).
Otherwise, I know you have [STRIKE]verbally[/STRIKE] requested [edit: via web chat] that CS review the footage, but I would urge you to out that in writing. Then if they fail to supply the footage for the court to see, that too would raise questions by the court as to why, again to your advantage.

You may need to act quickly, as CCTV footage may not be be retained for very long, unless there has been a specific reason to do so.

It would seem that I still haven't made my point clearly enough, so let me have another go!

If someone other than OP, and without OP's authority, has pretended to be OP and actually collected OP's order from Sports Direct then that would indeed appear to be a fraudulent action.

However, there are other scenarios that wouldn't entail someone doing this, such as administrative errors by Sports Direct, e.g. inadvertently marking the wrong order as collected, which, as far as I'm concerned, seem more plausible than the fraudulent one, for the reasons outlined previously.

Therefore at this stage it seems clear to me that there are both fraudulent and non-fraudulent possible explanations for what happened, so it's simplistic to assert that "it's fraud, pure and simple"....