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Accused Scammer's Username:UPTOWN
Accused Scammer's Profile (URL):You must login or register to view this content.
Did you:Purchase
Proof of ONSITE contact (Shop, skype username on site, etc.):
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Proof of contact (Screenshots): See Details
When did this happen: Jan. 9th 2015
How did you purchase: Paypal
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Amount: $350 USD
Have you contacted the scammer?: See Details
If yes, What did they say?: See Details
Details:
To: NGU Community and staffs
I have been a member of NGU since the beginning of 2010, as you can probably tell by my profile. I mainly use this site to purchase trophy
services from the available sellers. Over the years, I have dealt with a few "trusted" trophy-service sellers. Yet, I have NEVER
encountered someone who is as unpleasant and rude as the person I am disputing my case against. As a general warning, this is a rather
long post, if and only if you're interested, please read on. I will provide as much details as possible to not make the story one-sided.
My main PSN account has 120 platinums trophies as of today. However, as some of you may remember, I was here since the beginning era of
the "save-file hack": those of which do not need to be "redesigned" to earn trophies. Thus, I hopped on the bandwagon and gained a few
platinums (FUEL, SOCOM, BIOSHOCK, CO
Classic and etc) in the process. The major issue here is that these time stamps are obviously
hacked, being 1 second apart, 5-minute platinum and what not. This has always bothered me greatly, since I couldn't be ranked on most of
the third party trophy ranking websites.
Recently I've made a very tough decision: to drop my main account and duplicate all the original trophies on to a new account without the
illegitimate ones I've gotten over the years. In a sense, a fresh start. I stumbled upon UPTOWN's trophy shop thread and noticed he has a
rather large game database. I decided to contact him via PM and discuss my idea over Skype. During our initial skype conversation, he
quoted me a hefty price, and obviously the whole purpose of doing this is to make my new account look "legit":
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I definitely did not like the quote and decided not to follow through. A day later, he made contact with me again, hes willing to lower
the $2200 down to $10/game which came down to an estimate of $1000, what a perfect salesman, one would think:
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After a vast amount of back and forth haggling of which I wont bore you with the details, the final deal was set to $350:
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Since this is a rather large transaction for a virtual trophies (apparently not according to Uptown, since he's dealt with people paying
him as much as $5000, why am I not in this business again?), I did not want to pay him the full amount upfront, instead I wanted to pay
half now, and half after. He somehow convinced me to do the whole $350 before we start.
As an additional layer of insurance, I have asked him to send me a text message from his phone in order to have a way of contacting and
identifying him outside of the internet. He didn't want to at first but I told him that if he doesn't, it would be a deal breaker. He did
it shortly after. I didn't think it was too much to ask, since we're dealing with $350. I know I'm not the only one that would be worried
about sending someone you don't know three hundred bucks. We spent an hour talking about how this should be done. And at this point, we
hit the iceburg-
Now I'm fairly famaliar with how trophy game list works, the game with your latest synchronized (Sync'ed) trophy will always be top of the
list regardless of the time stamp on it. You can have a platinum with a timestamp of 1960, and it will still be top of your game list if
you just sync'ed it. So in order to look "legit" and not get reported, one must have atleast 90% of the games in a logical decending
order. What this means is that one must sync the games in the order of last earned trophy's time stamp. Ie. Sync'ing a 2010 platinum then
a 2011 platinum and so forth.
The seller, Uptown wanted to sync games randomly, without any sort of order. There was clearly a misunderstanding, and I wasn't sure if he
knew what "legit" means in his mind. But if I get taken out of the ranking due to my game list not being in the correct order, then what
is the purpose of purchasing a new "legit" account? According to Uptown noone can control the order of the game being sync'ed!:
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There he went, talking about how I'm treating him like a "slave", I literally laughed upon seeing this. I asked for a refund, since no
work has been completed, not even started. This is when I felt very threatened by his responses:
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Apparently, "I'm not sure how long" does not mean "indefinitely" according to Uptown??:
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He said he already spent the money, I'd only send the money a few hours prior. I am not sure how Paypal works, but I know there is a
processing time. At this point, I couldn't hold on to my anger any longer and lashed out at him:
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I wanted to get the conversation over with, so I gave him a Monday deadline, in which he agreed to only after I'd threaten to file a
claim. And I almost died from laughing - he wanted me to add more money if I wanted to go through with what I wanted in the first place!:
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Uptown, trying to convince me that what he was about to do with my account was "totally" legit, I had to throw that back in his face:
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I'm not sure where he went to school, clearly his logic was failing him.
My last attempt in trying to put some basic sense in to him. His argument was that we never agreed to the game order. Only to copy my
account, verbatim. And obviously, he doesn't know what verbatim meant:
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I wasn't exactly sure what got in to him but he was finally cooperating and willing to do what I have agreed upon, 10+ games a day for 9
days to complete our deal on the 9th day.
The 9-day period was due to my Paypal claim. I can withdraw my claim within 9 days of filing. We both agreed. And that was the end of the
conversation, he agreed to do a certain number of platinums on a per day basis.
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A day (24+hours) has passed. I checked my profile. I saw nothing. I asked him what's going on buddy? This was his response:
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Here is an image of me checking specifically while we were having this conversation:
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When in fact, we agreed just a day before that he was going to sync a specific amount of trophies per day. I escalated the claim. He
started his scamming methods at this point, asking me to cancel my claim so he can refund. I then immediately contacted Paypal. According
to Paypal, a refund can be granted from the seller at any point of the claim. So I clearly caught him lying:
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This is when things really got out of hand, a childish act would be an understatement:
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I have blocked him permenently after this.
I have followed through with Paypal and the case was an obvious victory for me, since I purchased his service, a service of which he did not provide:
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In the end, justice was served. So you may still wonder, why bother disputing and spending so much time writing this lengthy story.
Well, the reason is very simple. I know many people on the forums are either underage, or English isn't their first language. Conversing their stories may be hard to PayPal or even the staffs of this forums. I feel terrible if they ever get their money scammed by Uptown and couldn't get it back due to age and/or language barriers. So why not break the habbit from the root?
Again, I thank you to those that read the story. And hope justice can also be served to whomever deserves on NGU.