No replacement Samsung cellphone — and no refund
QI sent a Samsung phone for repair when the phone was under warranty. They returned it to an old address they had in their system. After an inquiry, they acknowledged their mistake and decided to send me a new replacement phone five months later.
Then, they said that they didn’t have the same model and said they would reimburse me. Two months later, I still have not received the money. The refund should have taken 72 hours. I would like my money back. Can you help me?
— Sweta Shukla, Marietta, Georgia
ASamsung should have sent your phone to the correct address. If it promised to replace your phone with a new one, it should have done so quickly, not months later. And you’re right, a refund like this should be fairly quick.
This is a strange case. A look at the correspondence between you and Samsung shows that, for some reason, the company had a bad address for you. Normally, when a package is returned to a sender, a company will try to find the right address and resend it. For reasons that are not clear, that didn’t happen.
Instead, Samsung simply decided to replace the phone. After that, I see a number of emails between you and Samsung, where you ask about the status of your phone and the company assures you that the device is on the way. But it isn’t.
It’s difficult to know what went wrong, based on the information I have. How did Samsung fail to update your address? Then again, maybe the postal service made a mistake. All we know is that you didn’t get a phone and now you don’t have a promised refund either.
Samsung is certainly not living up to its mission to deliver the world’s “best products” by selling you a phone that breaks and then putting you through this circus to get your phone back. I think you gave the company plenty of opportunities — and time — to fix the problem.
You followed useful strategies when problems like this arise. First, you kept good records, which really helped your case. Second, you archived all emails between you and the company. The paper trail between you and Samsung helped your case immensely.
You could have appealed your case to an executive. I list the executive contacts at Samsung on my consumer advocacy site.
I contacted Samsung on your behalf. It promised to send your check, but again, you received nothing. Ultimately, Samsung contacted you and verified your address, and you finally got the check.