Hi everyone,
a few weeks ago I saw that Stephen (aka erucsbo aka obscure) had posted inaccurate things about me here in this thread.
In fact, I am pretty sure that he himself would call what he posted slanderous, based on how he has reacted to things written about him, here and at other forums.
I'm the Swedish guy Stephen is referring to when he says that he has only ever received negative feedback from 2 people in 10 years on Ebay.
Anyway, when I saw what he had written I e-mailed him and asked him what was going on and why he had posted an inaccurate story. I didn't want to jump into any public posting and figured that we'd solve this privately,
I was hoping that he'd explain himself (and perhaps even apologize) privately but he has had almost 3 weeks to respond to my e-mail but hasn't bothered to do so (despite a reminder), so based on that I guess I will have to correct his story publicly for him.
Given how he himself apparently reacts to things that are written about him, and how he treats other people in public, I'm sure he will have no objections to me correcting the facts for him.
To quote him, I supposedly am
[quote][i]Originally posted by erucsbo[/i]
<br>a Swedish Minimal Synth collector who would buy records, and then if the record didn't sound exactly like experimental products would want his money back, but unlike you he would keep buying records. So in essence after I refunded him money which was much more than $40 he gave me 11 negative feedbacks. One on each record he bought on the last go around, and that is after he had money from me. That was very nice of him, but I have blocked his user handle so I should be fine now.
[/quote]
Well, what really happened is the following; I bought 35-40 records from him during a 3 month period last year and I gave him the benefit of the doubt at first (incl positive Ebay feedback despite various kinds of problems with the transcations) but as it gradually became clear what he was systematically doing (and that he was not going to change his ways despite input from me in private) I started to object more strongly to the way he was running his business.
So it is true that I eventually objected to being sold far too many records that were not even remotely what the item descriptions said that they would be. I received prog rock, indie rock, punk, even country and western, and other genres of music, all sold as being great and rare minimal synth and/or new wave.
But I never asked for a refund for any of those misrepresented records, so I never got any money in return from him for that reason.
At the time I had no idea who Stephen was, so I bought stuff from him in good faith and trusted his item descriptions. I did not know that it is a known fact (at least in a small circle) that his item descriptions can far too often not be trusted.
I love discovering new music and was buying stuff that I was not familiar with already, so I had to trust the item descriptions.
But regarding many of those records I bought, the only minimal synth thing about them was that the amount of synth on them was indeed minimal.
His reply was basically along the lines of "yeah, but if you just buy enough records from me, then statistically at least some of them should be good".
I did ask for, and got, a refund from him once though, for a couple of records that were significantly overgraded, but that's it. The refund was in the form of a store credit of $84.
He then sent me records worth $44 and promised to send the rest of the money via Paypal, but that never happened (and I don't care about it anymore, he can keep that money).
It is also true that I gave him negative feedback on Ebay for a number of items, but never because of deceptive item descriptions (even though he surely would have deserved that too).
I won't go into any details about the reason for the negative feedback that I actually left, let's just say that there were other parts of his business conduct that became unacceptable over time too.
But I guess everyone knows that feedback history is publicly available on Ebay, so that information is available there.
Now, whether Stephen has really only ever received negative feedback from 2 people on Ebay I will leave unsaid. But I do clearly remember that there were at least 3 other users who posted negative feedback around the time when I did that too.
Theoretically that could be the same person with 3 different user names of course.
I also know that Stephen didn't have a 100% positive feedback score before that either.
Anyway, that's it, sorry to use the forum space for more of this stuff but I'm done now, I just wanted to get this off my chest so this guy doesn't think that he can just make up whatever he likes about anyone as he goes along. And I really hope anyone else who deals with Stephen has a much better experience than I did.
Now onto something more fun; let's see if that Seeing Red re-issue does indeed emerge. I would also buy a copy for 7 EUR, it's a pretty cool single, although not really among the best ever made, imho [;)]
Regards,
Thomas
