Scammed by both seller and PPH
So, I bought a job for about £200 from a top seller on this site.
They never delivered so I demanded the advertised refund. They refused and kept my money, they even tried to pretend they did do it after I told them I wanted a refund, though PPH clearly showed they didn't. So I wrote a 1 star review on their profile detailing the illegal business practices and that they never delivered. They in turn wrote a 1 star review on my profile full of lies and then mailed me and said that if I remove my review they will remove theirs.
Despite PPH seeing that the review was fictitious they would not remove it, only the content of the review, so it was an empty 1 star review.
I also found out this seller does it to anyone who gives them under a 4 star review, I looked on other reviews and they constantly leave 1 star reviews writing bad things about the buyer if they give a slightly bad review. I am guessing they also mail those buyers holding their profiles ransom for their mistakes.
I thought PPH would back me up on this, after all the law was on my side. At first they pretended to care, but after inaction after inaction I finally got to the root of it, they didn't and they were not prepared to deal with this criminal behaviour, not only that but even though they also advertised a money back guarantee on their site for this seller they would not even follow through with that, despite all the evidence and proof being in PPH for them to see. Eventually they just went silent and refused to talk to me.
Now, I just received an email from PPH saying I have about £1000 in my seller account and that if I don't take it out in 15 days they will not only take my money but also charge me for it. Problem is it has taken them a year so far to verify my account. In that time I have never received any mail from them warning me about my money in my seller account, I didn't even know I had any TBH. When I got the mail I tried to re-verify my account, a week ago, still nothing. I have 8 days until PPH removes my money and charges me for all this.
It seems that PPH is a site made by criminals for criminals.
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I may actually, I wouldn't mind exposing the seller definitely.
They were awful, I hired them to write 10 blog posts, it's not like I was hiring to do programming etc. I just needed them writing since I didn't have the time, but it took so long for them to come back that I did the job myself in the end and asked for a refund after 0 communication.
Their entire work was shoddy, I also hired them to take care of a social footprint, I didn't ask for refund on that because they did do work, but I really wanted to, they didn't know a thing of what they were doing. They didn't even know that Facebook banned certain ad categories, and apparently this is a top rated social marketer with x amount of 5 star reviews. Their idea of a Facebook banner was a shoddy photoshop cut and when I said "post twice a week 2 times a month" they posted 2 times a single day on week and then left for the month, even though they used hootsuite to schedule everything... They even posted the wrong category on my facebook and twitter a few times
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Was the £200 paid in advance for 10 blog posts or a deposit?
Personally I wouldn't put too much trust in the ratings on PPH—without wanting to appear pompous, many buyers don't know good work from bad when it's outside their area of expertise. If you're savvy enough to recognise shabby graphic design, it's better to check portfolios and make up your own mind.
But yeah, if PPH have a money back guarantee they're not honouring and the seller didn't do the work, that's PPH's failing, not yours.
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Oh, I was a bit stupid and paid the bill thinking they were going to give me the work and they were billing me because they were going to deliver. But turns out they were just doing their billing cycle internally and made me pay. I shouldn't have really but they did send a sample blog post over to me, though I told them to go back and rewrite it because they didn't read my specification at all and it was full of English mistakes (English company), I even provided them with a rough outline of exactly what to write. Wasn't hard but you could tell the post was written within about 10 minutes while on the train, not thought through at all.
I mean, when I got hold of PPH I more expected PPH to punish the seller and to at least venerate my profile form the 1 star review, but instead the seller got sheltered and even though PPH said many times that they would do something about the seller, they just carried on their old tricks. I saw at least 5 other people within the reviews who also didn't have work handed in. Was very hard to see those reviews because you couldn't filter by them and they had so many 5 star reviews.
The money back guarantee is PPH advertising for the seller, but the seller is supposed to lose it if they don't honour it.
Basically PPH allowed them to break the law because punishing such a high rated seller would be damaging to them. I mean, I understand that, but then you create a very toxic atmosphere where people realise very quickly that if they get scammed then PPH will just let it fly and that in turn attracts like minded individuals such as this seller.
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Ok I am going to name names, since I have now just done a Google search and it seems they have a very bad rep on the internet now, they didn't before but it seems since they failed my job they have garnished a very bad rep https://social-buzzing.pissedconsumer.com/review.html
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Seriously, PPH, socialbuzzing are scamming people all over the internet, hell they are selling black hat SEO on your site (very bad, definitely illegal advertising of the benefits), the people who review have no idea that actually it will damage their SEO beyond repair.
They are lieing about you and cheating you behind your back and you let them get away with it? Even scamming their customers to help them???
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I checked out your link and their PPH profile... it does seem to be like I said—the work is obviously bad, but only to people savvy enough to recognise it as such.
e.g.
* They offer design and writing services but the banner and copy on their PPH profile aren't at a professional level, to put it politely. (It some cases it's just bad due to spelling and syntactical errors.)
* Their prices are super-low (add 1000 Pinterest followers for £20; three 400 word blog posts for £35... on *any* subject!) which indicates low quality work.
* Many of their services don't make sense (like that Pinterest one: if the content isn't good enough to attract 1000 followers organically, then it's the content that's the problem).
I even managed to check out one of the social media profiles they've apparently managed since Oct 2017 and, without seeing what it was like before, it has around 800 followers to 400 following (terrible considering it's been around since 2010 and been managed by "experts" for four months), a whole load of retweeted articles (maybe automated retweeting of anything with specific hashtags), and zero engagement on their original tweets, which are just "Here's the new article we've published [link]".
But back to your problem—I see what you mean about PPH not wanting to punish these people because they're one of the top sellers. However, they should at least refund you and remove the negative review.
Looking at it from PPH's POV, I *understand* how their approach can be that if buyers seem happy to buy crap from this seller, then let them, even though I *personally* would feel nauseous to even be associated with bad work, let alone be facilitating it.
In other words, PPH is designed for high quantity, low quality work, and so they have no real incentive to stop doing so any time soon. This doesn't mean you should give up on your refund and getting them to remove your negative review, though.
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That was their response to it (the ticket). At first they were like "oh yes, you can withdraw your money now" (I even got the full confirmation email that the money was approved and going to be released) but as soon as I actually get permission to withdraw I had that permission removed and now they say I must add more documents and those documents need 7 days approval and I can fast track for 1 day approval if I pay £10.
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