I just heard that an ex-employer of mine, James, was fined in court the other day in Melbourne for importing counterfeit brand name clothing.
I helped the federal police get this guy to court!!
Back in 2007 I was recruited by James to manage his website. He had a shop in Melbourne and wanted to put his products online.
At the time, James was 23 yrs old and wanted to be a millionaire by the time he was 25.
I answered an advertisement on the Internet for someone to work at home managing his website, applied, and got the job.
He sold homewares and kitchenware, soft furnishing, home decor and ornaments. He also sold Calvin Klein underwear. He sold it very cheap.
I think around $5 for a pair of mens undies or a singlet.
The Calvin Klein items were his biggest seller, we would sell them to buyers all over the world in bulk, hundreds of dollars worth at a time.
I think most of the buyers were buying them to resell in menswear stores.
Basically what my job entailed was: James would photograph the products and email the pics thru to me with a short description of the item.
I would edit the photos and make the ads for each product to go onto his website. I would also manage any email enquiries from buyers, plus track payments for items when they were sold.
Once items were paid for, then I would email James with the buyers postal details and a list of what they had purchased. He then would get his staff in Melbourne to package and post the goods.
Firstly, he overcharged massively for postage, if for instance an item cost $5 to post, he would charge the buyer $18 for postage!!
So I would get a LOT of complaints about the cost of postage (even though the price was set out before the buyer purchased anything)!
Anyway.......
I had never physically seen the products, I'm in Tassie, his shop is in Melbourne. But it didn't take long to work out that the Calvin Klein mens wear he was selling, were not the real deal. Complaints were coming in thick and fast from disgruntled buyers when they received the goods, they could tell they were cheap imitations. The workmanship for a start was a dead give away apparently (I also would have thought that the cheap price would also have been a give away - but plenty of people got sucked in)
Some people emailed and asked for comfirmation first that these were genuine items, I checked with James and he said they were definately genuine and that they were a 'parallel import' (whatever that is )! So, I assured the buyers they were buying the real thing. So you can imagine the tone of their emails when they received the items.
They were NOT HAPPY JAN!! They wanted refunds. I told James and he said yes sure, tell them to send them back and he would do a refund in full.
Great. No worries.
So they did. It was not only the Calvins that people returned, the home decor products were never packed adequately for postage and most got broken, James said he would refund.
Did he refund? Ever? NO!! That started another wave of abusive emails, people had returned shoddy goods for a promised refund, but he never once refunded anyone. I couldn't action a refund from his bank account.
Talking about bank accounts..... James had never had a credit card, when I set up his website, he needed to pay the webhost by credit card, plus we sold a lot of his items on ebay too (which I also managed for him) he paid ebay something like $5,000 a month in fee's because he was selling massive amounts of goods on the site. He did not want to get a credit card, didn't like them. He talked me into using my credit card to pay his fee's.
He transferred the money to my bank account first and then I paid his fees. The great thing about this is, I had a credit card with Reward Points that I could use for travel. You have no idea the amount of points I racked up in the time I was working for him - it took us years to use them all up!! (free holidays)
But, I could see the writing on the wall with this job, he was going to come undone eventually because his customers were now threatening to take him to court. I knew that flogging counterfeit goods was a federal offence, I also knew that you could be tracked via your Internet Service Provider. Which means that my ISP would be recorded against his website everytime I log into his page. I knew I was gonna go down with his dodgy business.
In the meantime, I was planning a weekend in Melbourne. James said he would take us out to dinner at a flash restaurant. I was helping him turnover 30k a month with his online sales, so thats the least he could do!
During the day we went to his shop in Melbourne, he wasn't there and none of the staff knew us.
That night he picked us up in his Audi sports car and took us to dinner at Crown Casino. His girlfriend Alana was with him, she was very very thin and went to the bathroom after each mouthful of food
We had a nice evening and when he dropped us off later he took off screeching his tyres, being a show-off.
I had been trying to talk him into getting his own credit card so that I could remove mine off his ebay page - because I needed to resign to get away from his dodgy business practices. James banked with the Bank of Melbourne, and as I'd been recently working for Westpac, I was able to advise him to get a visa debit card - Westpac owned Bank of Melbourne and the BOM had a visa debit card, where, at the time, westpac didn't have that product, you could only get one if you were a resident of Victoria. I was quite pushy about it and he finally got around to filling in an application and he got one. Once I'd put his card number on to his website/ebay and removed mine, I wrote my resignation letter to him. I told him I could no longer work for a company that was ripping off their customers like he was.
But there was still the problem of all those customers who said they were starting legal action against him. My ISP would connect me to his business once investigations began.
So, I decided that I had to be one of the first to report his fraudulent activity to the authorities.
The federal police contacted Calvin Kleins reps and they got a private investigator to follow it up. I had lots of phone calls assisting them in their investigation.
They did an anonymous visit to James' shop and came back to me for confirmation about a few things, like who owns the black Audi out the back and whats inside the shipping container out the back.
Next they set up a sting on his shop. The investigator rang me afterwards to let me know that James was a very terrified young man and agreed to dob in his suppliers!!
They said I would not need to give evidence in court and James would never know that I helped them in their investigations. There were plenty of other people who could have dobbed on him.
He is still in the import business apparently. I just hope he is not falsely representing his goods and giving refunds where refunds are due.
I helped the federal police get this guy to court!!
Back in 2007 I was recruited by James to manage his website. He had a shop in Melbourne and wanted to put his products online.
At the time, James was 23 yrs old and wanted to be a millionaire by the time he was 25.
I answered an advertisement on the Internet for someone to work at home managing his website, applied, and got the job.
He sold homewares and kitchenware, soft furnishing, home decor and ornaments. He also sold Calvin Klein underwear. He sold it very cheap.
I think around $5 for a pair of mens undies or a singlet.
The Calvin Klein items were his biggest seller, we would sell them to buyers all over the world in bulk, hundreds of dollars worth at a time. I think most of the buyers were buying them to resell in menswear stores.
Basically what my job entailed was: James would photograph the products and email the pics thru to me with a short description of the item.
I would edit the photos and make the ads for each product to go onto his website. I would also manage any email enquiries from buyers, plus track payments for items when they were sold.
Once items were paid for, then I would email James with the buyers postal details and a list of what they had purchased. He then would get his staff in Melbourne to package and post the goods.
Firstly, he overcharged massively for postage, if for instance an item cost $5 to post, he would charge the buyer $18 for postage!!
So I would get a LOT of complaints about the cost of postage (even though the price was set out before the buyer purchased anything)!
Anyway.......
I had never physically seen the products, I'm in Tassie, his shop is in Melbourne. But it didn't take long to work out that the Calvin Klein mens wear he was selling, were not the real deal. Complaints were coming in thick and fast from disgruntled buyers when they received the goods, they could tell they were cheap imitations. The workmanship for a start was a dead give away apparently (I also would have thought that the cheap price would also have been a give away - but plenty of people got sucked in)
Some people emailed and asked for comfirmation first that these were genuine items, I checked with James and he said they were definately genuine and that they were a 'parallel import' (whatever that is )! So, I assured the buyers they were buying the real thing. So you can imagine the tone of their emails when they received the items.
They were NOT HAPPY JAN!! They wanted refunds. I told James and he said yes sure, tell them to send them back and he would do a refund in full.
Great. No worries.
So they did. It was not only the Calvins that people returned, the home decor products were never packed adequately for postage and most got broken, James said he would refund.
Did he refund? Ever? NO!! That started another wave of abusive emails, people had returned shoddy goods for a promised refund, but he never once refunded anyone. I couldn't action a refund from his bank account.
Talking about bank accounts..... James had never had a credit card, when I set up his website, he needed to pay the webhost by credit card, plus we sold a lot of his items on ebay too (which I also managed for him) he paid ebay something like $5,000 a month in fee's because he was selling massive amounts of goods on the site. He did not want to get a credit card, didn't like them. He talked me into using my credit card to pay his fee's. He transferred the money to my bank account first and then I paid his fees. The great thing about this is, I had a credit card with Reward Points that I could use for travel. You have no idea the amount of points I racked up in the time I was working for him - it took us years to use them all up!! (free holidays)
But, I could see the writing on the wall with this job, he was going to come undone eventually because his customers were now threatening to take him to court. I knew that flogging counterfeit goods was a federal offence, I also knew that you could be tracked via your Internet Service Provider. Which means that my ISP would be recorded against his website everytime I log into his page. I knew I was gonna go down with his dodgy business.
In the meantime, I was planning a weekend in Melbourne. James said he would take us out to dinner at a flash restaurant. I was helping him turnover 30k a month with his online sales, so thats the least he could do!
During the day we went to his shop in Melbourne, he wasn't there and none of the staff knew us.
That night he picked us up in his Audi sports car and took us to dinner at Crown Casino. His girlfriend Alana was with him, she was very very thin and went to the bathroom after each mouthful of food
We had a nice evening and when he dropped us off later he took off screeching his tyres, being a show-off.
I had been trying to talk him into getting his own credit card so that I could remove mine off his ebay page - because I needed to resign to get away from his dodgy business practices. James banked with the Bank of Melbourne, and as I'd been recently working for Westpac, I was able to advise him to get a visa debit card - Westpac owned Bank of Melbourne and the BOM had a visa debit card, where, at the time, westpac didn't have that product, you could only get one if you were a resident of Victoria. I was quite pushy about it and he finally got around to filling in an application and he got one. Once I'd put his card number on to his website/ebay and removed mine, I wrote my resignation letter to him. I told him I could no longer work for a company that was ripping off their customers like he was.
But there was still the problem of all those customers who said they were starting legal action against him. My ISP would connect me to his business once investigations began.
So, I decided that I had to be one of the first to report his fraudulent activity to the authorities.
The federal police contacted Calvin Kleins reps and they got a private investigator to follow it up. I had lots of phone calls assisting them in their investigation.
They did an anonymous visit to James' shop and came back to me for confirmation about a few things, like who owns the black Audi out the back and whats inside the shipping container out the back.
Next they set up a sting on his shop. The investigator rang me afterwards to let me know that James was a very terrified young man and agreed to dob in his suppliers!!
They said I would not need to give evidence in court and James would never know that I helped them in their investigations. There were plenty of other people who could have dobbed on him.
He is still in the import business apparently. I just hope he is not falsely representing his goods and giving refunds where refunds are due.
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