Currys won’t pay for wiping all the data on my laptop

D.O. writes: In January last year, I purchased a laptop from Currys PC World in Watford. I also paid for the transfer of software, data and music from my old laptop. The total cost was £617. A month later I found my iTunes library was missing and by March all my data files disappeared, so I went back to the store. I told them I also had my iTunes on my phone, so they connected this to the laptop – and my iTunes library was wiped from my phone as well. CURRYS took back your laptop and tried to recover the lost contents, but without success. After that, things went from bad to worse. You were told the defective laptop would be returned to the store, but staff there knew nothing about it. The ‘Team Knowhow’ people from Currys told you it was sending an expert to your home, but a van driver arrived and said he had simply been sent to collect the laptop – the same laptop that Currys had already been holding for months. Then the laptop was returned to you, in the same state as when you returned it for repair.

You asked Currys to pay for an outside data recovery firm to investigate, but it refused. When I intervened I got a different story – that the laptop had in fact been repaired, with a successful recovery of all the lost data, but that files had then corrupted because of ‘a rare fault’.

Currys offered you an unspecified ‘gesture of goodwill’, apparently reluctant to accept that it was obliged to give you a full refund for having sold you a defective product – and that was before any thought of compensating you for the lost data. When you quite rightly rejected this, the company finally paid for an outside expert, but all efforts to fix the laptop failed.

Next Currys hedged over any responsibility for wiping your iTunes, saying this content would not be transferred when you bought your new laptop. Yet you gave me the store’s receipt, clearly listing all the data to be transferred, including iTunes.

With statements from Currys now displaying more twists and turns than a rattlesnake, the firm then told me there was actually nothing wrong with the laptop and that it had no record of wiping your iTunes from your phone. Both statements contradicted what Currys had already told me.

Meanwhile, with Currys telling me it had exhausted all possibilities, you were still receiving text messages from the firm, assuring you it was ‘working hard to complete your repair and will continue to keep you updated’.

It has taken months of arguing and negotiation to get to this point, but Currys has finally repaid the full £617 that you paid. It also offered a further £500 to make up for the loss of your data and for all the inconvenience. You have reluctantly accepted this as it was clear Currys would not offer more without a court case.

Currys told me: ‘We have investigated Mr O’s enquiry and apologised to him for his experience and the inconvenience caused.’