Bitcoin Forum

Has anyone successfully ordered from or communicated with Coinabul recently?

I ordered over 80btc worth of stuff from them over six months ago and received nothing. I have received about five emails from them in that time (despite me emailing them many many times, sending PMs on this site, and attempting contact via IRC), and have had no contact from them in about five weeks now. None of those emails have been much more than "we'll look into it" or "someone will get back to you".

I'm wondering if they've gone underground or if they've just stopped responding to me hoping that I'll just go away.

Watching this thread

yeah just a warning I never got my 2 bars of silver from coinabul some 6 months ago, or a refund on my 8btc paid... why ?? because the guy never paid customs and apparently the bars were returned to sender, but coinabul never repaid me the BTC or declared they recieved the bars back... a trusted friend of mine then told me to watch out for coinabul as the guy running it is a sly piece of work and skimps on anything and he was not surprised by my situation...

btw it took like 2 months for the guy to even send the bars in the first place.... if he ever did...

I have not heard if a situation where the sender pays customs.

what the ?
They still owe you 8btc ?

They still owe me over 80 btc!

So this post finally shook loose a response email. I had been communicating with someone via IRC a few months ago, but given the lack of any other forms of communication I had my doubts if that person was really part of Coinabul. This email confirms that it was and the story goes like this:

I ordered a stack of silver from Coinabul in July 2012 and paid for insured shipping. It took over six weeks for them to (allegedly) send it. In that whole time I received no emails or other comms initiated by them and progress was only due to me harassing them via IRC.

When I didn't receive the shipment in a reasonable time frame I contacted them again. It should have been easy to find with a tracking number... but they don't use tracking numbers! How they can use insured shipping with no tracking numbers eludes me.  Because I have no proof that it was ever sent, I have doubts that it ever was.

They then said they'd start an insurance claim but apparently the insurance company refused to cover it for some reason. Jay said he'd "probably replace all or part of it at [his] own cost" but then changed his mind.

The last: "There is nothing more that I can do for you".

Moral of the story: If they do bother to send your shipment, they apparently have no need to replace it if it gets lost -- even if you pay for insurance.

Have you tried contacting us?

Sellers aren't responsible for duty/VAT fees at the destination country. That's beyond absurd that you don't understand that.

As to the other claims, if something was sent via USPS and insured, it came with tracking. If the USPS confirms receipt of the item (i.e. it is in process, went out for distribution,etc), then it's between the buyer and the USPS. I'm only here clarifying these things because i sell online as well, and didn't want the incorrect information here to become accepted fact to someone who doesn't know better.

I'd also be curious to know - in both cases of non-receipt, was the shipping address on both overseas (i.e. out of the continental US)?

That's what I would have thought. I asked them for a tracking number and they told me that there wasn't one. I suspect that they don't send it via insured post, but send it via regular post and insure it some other way? Why else would an insurance company be involved?


Outside of continental US here, Australia. Where, incidentally, consumer protection laws make what happened here blatantly illegal.

Check the below two links. Both are orders i had from customers in Australia over the last few months. Both confirmed received well over a month ago, both never had their tracking status updated after they left the United States. Every problem i've ever had with international shipping occurs after it leaves the USPS's hands. Other country's postal systems are just poorly run. However, i'd be willing to bet if you spent more time than just checking the tracking number online, and dug a little deeper (called your country's postal system), you would find your answer. I don't believe that you were scammed at all.

https://tools.usps.com/go/TrackConfirmAction_input?qtc_tLabels1=LN384879108US

https://tools.usps.com/go/TrackConfirmAction_input?qtc_tLabels1=LN389079020US

Hello,

All of our orders, insured or not, having tracking information.

We filed a claim with the insurance company but they refused the claim. It is not our fault, and we cannot be possibly expected to act as a fallback insurance company, we'd be bankrupt after a couple incidents.

Jay offered to pay you back out of his pocket, but apparently you rubbed him the wrong way after "harassing them via IRC." At no point did he say you were getting any money back, he said he would probably pay you back, out of his own pocket, because he felt bad about the situation. Company policy dictates that we can't do that. We can't afford to provide that privilege to all customers that have claims that get denied.

As for the tracking info: I can send you a PM with the tracking number if you would like for *proof*.

I do apologize for this whole event. We've processed well over a million dollars in precious metals transactions, we don't tend to lose packages, and we almost never have to file insurance claims. It was an unlucky break and you should be complaining to the insurance company, not us.

Furthermore, here is a timeline of events!

July 30th, order placed.

August 22nd, order shipping

August 25th, order leaves shipping facility. Heading overseas, where it is lost, probably in customs.

17 business days or ~3 weeks of processing. Not 6 weeks.

We've had a lot of issues with gmail deleting our confirmation emails, but we always urge customers to either check the dashboard, where all that info is listed, or to email us.

All in all, it was unfortunate, but not our fault. When you ship anything internationally there is always an added risk, also insurance companies can be awful.

Once again, I apologize for this incident,
-Jon

There was a series of changes (all to the worse) for tracking.  USPS had to pay the other countries for scanning and slowly USPS stopped doing that.  Now it is luck of the draw for packages to get scanned.  USPS stopped tracking for the small flat rate box international last year though again sometimes they DID get scanned and tracked anyhow. 

There needs to be a worldwide standard for postal tracking and scanning.

I was dealing with customs in Thailand and they demand an enormous fee if the buyer initiates a RTS procedure. It's absolute thievery.

shoulda gone with amagimetals!

Yes i contacted you initially when the item was returned to sender... your response was that you would look into it once the bars were returned.. i sent emails about 1-2 months ago asking if anything had been recieved and if i could get a refund... no replies :( i can send again if u need to look up tracking info and order numbers etc?

ty for replying in here :)

I'm not sure who you are, so please send again. I'll figure out what happened!

Thanks,
-Jon

Hi jon just sent an email to contact@coinabul.com, I await your response :)

Can you send it to jon [at] coinabul.com. Contact emails do not always go to me.

Can do :) just sent

Under Australian consumer law you would be legally obliged to act as a fallback. Your insurance company insures you, not me. So, I certainly CAN expect it.


I rubbed him the wrong way? I was never anything but polite. Communication was never initiated by anyone but me. Please remember that this has been going on for over 7 months. Excuse me if I was persistent.

That he had the gall to act affronted when I am the one aggrieved speaks volumes about your business.


Pick one. You can't have both.


That would be nice, thank you. Please PM it.



Why? I'm not their customer, Coinabul is.


Apologies if my dates were off. One of the downfalls of not receiving email is that I have no record on which to fall back. I suspect that is one of the benefits for the other side of only interacting via IRC.

After reading this, and with the slow, slow no-contact issues I had with them months ago, i will never purchase from them again. I was lucky in that I got my metal. If the buyer did nothing wrong, why haven't you or the insurance company made them whole? Sounds like the buyer did nothing wrong, except doing business with you.

Jon,

I have sent you a PM and a support email at this address.  I would like a confirmation of my purchase and an ETA ASAP. 

If my purchase goes smoothly I will review your service here and in another thread. 

Thanks,
Rex

Coingenuity has fixed all issues.

Emails:  They are being tagged as spam by major providers because of keywords.  This is not ideal, but hard to get around.  As an IT guy, I know what a pain this can be.  Even if you get it fixed, it will take a long time for the filters to update.

Communication:  As soon as the staff wakes up, they handle the issues in order.  It may take 4-12 hours to get through all support emails.  But if you ask them for your invoice, they will send you a professional PDF of your purchase.  They also will update you with the shipping date.  

Location:  They ship from the US and have setup near airports to make it as quick as possible.  Shipments leaving the US are subject to customs of the destination countries.  This is not their fault -- they don't own CUSTOMS.  But they seem to work hard to sort these issues out.  

I feel confident they are working hard, sometimes 20hrs a day, to handle the large influx of purchases.  My communication with Jon has been excellent.  

If you have any questions about my purchases or experience, don't hesitate to PM.  

Cheers,
A Dead Weasel

We're going to be fixing the email issue pretty soon. The delays have been getting our full attention until recently unfortunately.

How much are they paying you?

I'm an IT guy too. No emails from Coinabul went to spam. I did receive some emails from them so I know they weren't being blocked.

They didn't handle issues with my order.

This.

I've experienced some epic failures in customer service in my time, but this is the only one that has ended with, "Sorry, you're shit outta luck."

Great, could you actually ship my order?

Just to say Jon has been very good and quick to respond to me now that I am emailing him direct, and he has resent the bars to me as of today (or yesterday perhaps) and I should be receiving them in 7 days he says, so I will update here once I have them in my hands.

Point to note as well he did not ask me to repay for shipping, so far he has been very good at resolving my order and hats off to him... but obviously I do not have the bars yet so still could turn sour.. but i get the feeling he wants to resolve the matter as this thread shows signs of very bad business... but i think we "may" be the few... just hope you get your orders to TradeFortress

Send me a pm or email with order info and I can give you an update.

It's your mail provider blackhole-ing likely spam. Not spambox on the client end.

As for your order, we filed with the insurance company, they said no. We can't do anything more. I'm sorry.

-Jon

The Insurance company decided to refuse his claim. Nothing we could do on our end to stop them. We've since then purchased different insurance because of their terrible refusal. It shouldn't happen again, but like any insurance company, they can on occasion deny claims.

We picked a better insurance package. We've shipped thousands of packages. This is the only one that got lost and the insurance company denied. There will always be a bit of risk, but we do everything to minimize it. We don't like it happening either.

Given they didn't even offer to replace half of the bullion, refund the postage, heck, even to refund the insurance portion of the postage, it hasn't cost them a cent. So I'm not sure why they don't like it happening.

Jay told me (at the time) that mine has been the only package to go missing. If that is true, then their recovery rate for lost packages is 0%. If your happy with those odds, buy from them by all means.

Ok nope jon asked for 0.5BTC to reship this so he has not giving me the shipping again for free.... but that was a little bonus I thought I was getting for the delay in me receiving my product and is a cost that has to come from somewhere... just turning out to be a very expensive 2 1ox bars of silver... now paid over 9btc for them...

Wow this thread is not a good advert.

The gold industry is filled with fraud.

Not everyone who has health insurance has their claims filled. It's the same in this situation.

He pays me with the order I paid BTC for.  When it arrives, I will update.  If it does not, I will join your witch hunt with great zeal.

He also communicated with me on #bitcoin-assets.   I have rec'd a shipping confirmation email yesterday.  As it ships from within the states (I Believe) I should have it shortly.   

Feel free to PM me if you want any details.  I plan to review Coinabul once the purchase is complete.

I'm saying the industry is filled with it. Mostly on the consumer side. I didn't say anything about this specific case.

Scam means we mislead. Scam means a trick. We did neither of those things. There also must be a gain. We gain nothing from this scenario. It sucks, we've apologized for it, but there isn't much we can do.

I cannot believe the logic Coinabul is using here.

The point of insurance is to ensure that Coinabul does not have any losses in the case where they need to re-send or refund an order. This has nothing to do with your customer except that he specifically asked for and payed extra for insurance. If my insurance company denied my claim for car repair after I already got it fixed, it isn't like I can tell the repair shop, "sorry, claim denied, I refuse to pay".

Coinabul is absolutely responsible, their insurance was inadequate or, at best, misrepresented for their packages and asking the customer to accept full responsibility for this is shocking.

This isn't a scam, it's just poor customer service. Coinabul is within their rights to deny responsibility for the loss unless someone can show evidence that this is a direct result of Coinabul's actions or covered under their terms and conditions.

I'm sorry, are you claiming that is was not insured or that it was insured incorrectly? I don't see Coinabul admitting either, in any case.

It was insured. I paid a premium for insured shipping.

Coinabul claim they have changed their insurance arrangements so this won't happen again. This strongly suggests they were uninsured or underinsured. That I should eat the result of that is what is question.

Looks like Coinabul simply didn't get the proper insurance (or any insurance) and responsible for the loss. It's about time to move this thread to the scammer subforum.

I am going to bet that Coinabul didn't check the terms of the insurance policy and fucked that one up. I could be wrong, but USPS doesn't cover gold/silver coins unless they're sent via Registered Mail.

You can provide the proof of insurance and the letter of claim denial. Scam or not, unless you properly insured its your loss.

Watching this thread. Planned on buying from coinabul.

This thread isn't exactly inspiring confidence in them, though.  :-\

I've been doing some more thinking and digging. According to Jay, the insurance claim was denied because the value of the goods had changed taking it across some arbitrary threshold such that their policy no longer covers it. This apparently caused the insurance company to deny a claim, not only for the replacement cost, but also for the original cost.

I don't know the name of the insurance company or policy, when the insurance was taken out on the item or when the claim was allegedly filed so I can't do any detailed digging, but I did have some thoughts:

- The insurance company obviously has something in their T&Cs which states that if the value of an item changes by a certain percent or value, then they won't cover it. Coinabul should reasonably have known about this.
- Silver is a volatile market. Coinabul should have reasonably expected the price of silver to fluctuate between taking out the insurance and a possible claim.
- The above two points together show that Coinabul could (and should) have reasonably taken steps to ensure that their insurance arrangements were adequate to cover market fluctuations, but was negligent in failing to do so.
- I could not have reasonably known about this or taken steps to avoid this, not being a party to the insurance contract or having access to the details of the contract.
- Coinabul, not I, have been negligent in this instance and should therefore be culpable.

That they have allegedly changed their insurance structure to avoid this only attests to their negligence in my case. I no longer think this is at the foot of the insurance company. It is clearly at the foot of Coinabul. This moves it firmly into scam territory. Coinabul mislead me to believe that my order would be sufficiently insured but failed to do so.

It's hard to argue with anything you said.

Let me understand: matthew open the thread for the famous pirate bet, no one send money, no one lose money and he get a "scammer" tag; he scammed exactly 0 bitcoins. Here someone PAID for something, DID NOT receive it, no scammer tag?

Guys seriously, something is totally wrong lol. ::)

This is quite reasonable and indeed the buyer is not of fault here. Watching this thread closely to see how it turns out.

The funny thing is.....the only reason the significant value change happened is because coinabul took weeks to months to ship the order. Maybe if they shipped in timely manner....that would help. I'm in the US (like they are, and my last order took over a month to get here).

On a side note, i ordered a top-notch Alienware PC from Dell for around $5k. It shipped after 2 months but disappeared along the way. I paid for insured, expedited shipping but was told the insurance company wouldn't cover it, so I was sh*t outta luck and would get nothing. Normal occurance,huh? J/K none of the above happened....just an illustration of how crazy coinabul's actions are.

As to the scamming issue...coinabul did gain. They have the buyer's BTC (and who knows, maybe his metal too) and buyer got nothing....so yeah definite gain for scammer.

Scam thread opened: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=149253.0

Their complete lack of reasonable response to this episode is very disappointing.  Presumably they don't intend to stick around long?

I have a feeling that they're a pretty small shop and they cannot take a few grand loss.

Everything came through perfectly.  Well done, Coinabul.

FTFY!

But maybe he did receive it... that's the problem with no tracking to the destination.  We'll never know.  But the existing tracking proves that Coinabul (who I do not know and have never used BTW) sent him something and that it left the country.

I sell OSHW electronics and the low average price (1-2 BTC) makes it impossible to use a service like UPS or Fed-ex with door-to-door international tracking.  I tell my customers that they are responsible for losses once the item leaves my country, and offer door-to-door tracking which nobody ever chooses b/c it costs 1-2BTC itself.

Now offering and purchasing the insurance really confuses matters.  Was it clear that this insurance offering was a pass through to a 3rd party insurance provider?  Was there a whole legal document detailing the insurance policy that the buyer could have read?  If so, IMHO Coinabul can pass the buck of responsibility to that insurance provider (by supplying the name and claim number to the purchaser for follow up), or point to the legal document.

But the real morale to this story is don't ship something worth 80BTC without full tracking.  Its too damaging to your business when the customs officer keeps the goods or the customer claims it was not received.

I sent an e-bay item to Brazil. The tracking showed "delivered" but the buyer claimed he never received it. He filed a claim with ebay and they refunded his money. I showed them the tracking number and that it showed "delivered" but that was not good enough for them, they said that they needed to see that it was delivered to the right person.

So I started a whole process with the USPS to go through their international shipping and through all of that...in the end, there were way too many steps for me to go through and life got more important than spending my days on the phone. So the guy likely got some free stuff. Such is life.

Or maybe not. I once ordered some stuff and it was delivered to another town and a guy named "Jimmy Hendrix" signed for it. Don't ask me why, I don't know. Thankfully the sender didn't quibble at all and just sent another parcel. This was in Europe. Brazil isn't known for their trustworthy postal system.

Does anyone have a physical location for where they are doing business from? I just ordered from them ( a small test order to see if they are legit) and they have not responded to my emails yet.

I really shouldve searched the forums first but the site looked legit and I had never heard anyone complaining about them. I talk to people in chats constantly and we always talk about what sites are no good or rip-offs. This site never came up as being bad.

Now Im starting to get worried. Especially since I lost a little over 1 btc on Instawallet recently I really dont want to lose anymore.

Well, I received an email early today from Coinabul claiming that they were shipping my order and it said it would be sent "Next Day". It also had contact phone numbers if I had any questions. However, there is no tracking info to verify it. So only time will tell if they really do ship it. If anyone wants a screen cap of the email let me know and I will add it to the forum but Im not going to waste my time cropping and editing it and blurring info if no one is interested.

UPDATE!!

I have received my order from Coinabul.com. I placed an order a few weeks ago and when there was no response got worried. Checked the forums and thought I got ripped off.

Today I received my order. For verification it was shipped USPS and I will upload a scan of the package. I dont want to post the tracking number here and give my address but I will scan and blur the receiving address.

This is good news. Heck, I might even order from them again

But probably not

I would love to get mine, it's been a month and a half with nothing but BS and runaround.
I will gladly post on all their scam threads to let everyone know when/if I get my 85 btc order.  I really hope they pull it off and send my metals or a refund, but it's hard to be upbeat about the likelihood at this point.