all right are you guys familiar with the acronym faffo? it doesn't stand for first in first out
stands for [ __ ] around and find out and that's exactly what happened to a company that tried
to sell two electric fat bikes, this one right here and another one, to me and a friend. they
tried to do some greasy stuff and my name is adrian from youmotorcycle i make videos
aimed at helping motorcyclists, i got this one for free plus my buddies for free, i'm gonna
explain to you how we did that and hopefully it'll help you guys from ever being ripped off.
so the bike in question is an ncm aspen. it's an electric fat bike sold online by a company
called leon cycle. they had a special going on and i reached out to a buddy about it because they had
an extra special special where in addition to the sale price if you bought two units instead of one
and you had them both shipped to the same address they would throw you another 100 bucks off. so i
asked a friend hey man hello everybody. i asked a friend hey man would you be interested in buying
this bike with me this is the price he said sure absolutely let's do it. also there's a castle.
for those of you wondering why this looks familiar if you're from toronto you'll know
it as casa loma. if you're not from toronto you will know this castle as where the x-men
live. all the marvel movies where you see the castle and this is like professor x's mansion or
whatever where he trains them how to be better little mutants that's this building right here
casa loma. i'll do another video on it another day let's dip this way i want to show you something.
check this out this was a combination uh garage for the guys cars and horse stables all in one.
can you imagine if this was your garage where you store your motorcycles? and you just happen
to freaking build a tower for it? like why does a garage and a horse stable need a tower? i don't
know! so i called up a buddy i said do you want to do this he said sure that sounds awesome so i
placed an order and i paid by visa that's very important we'll talk about that in a second.
so a couple weeks go by and finally the bikes arrive.
ironically they were delivered by some sort of medical services vehicle that was kind of weird
but whatever. and i noticed right away two of the boxes well the two boxes were both damaged
but only just a little bit i'm not too worried about it. i could see a little bit of the bike
sticking out through the box. now i got a bit i am not too worried about this bike being damaged on
shipping because you know it's it's an electric fat bike we didn't buy this for
paved bicycle paths. we bought this for shitty terrain basically snow sand that sort of thing
so the scratches weren't a big concern. so me and buddy unpack the boxes from our from our bikes
and we start to put them together and we do his first and then we do mine and sure enough you know
the bikes are scratched okay that's fine but the bigger concern is this: my bike on the odometer
says it has 500 meters on it which i figured they use just to to test you know so fair enough. his
bike has four and a half kilometers. to me that's a very extensive test so we're like oh right away
something is coming up a little bit fishy. then to make it worse we go for a ride right away and
we can notice immediately that his electric motor is making a weird grinding sound versus
mine is is very very smooth you just have the normal kind of it's making a crunching sound
right. it sounds like it's chewing up gears or something i don't know what it's doing.
you know get back home and the first thing i do is i email customer service and i say hey
we got these problems both bikes arrived a little bit damaged the box came up a little bit damaged
but more importantly his has four and a half kilometers mine has half a kilometer and most
concerningly his makes this weird motor noise. and i gotta say that customer service from leon
cycle at this point was really good still because they email back right away saying hey can you
send us some closer up pictures so we can see the damage whatever whatever. i sent in the pictures
two hours later he replies to me yeah you know that many kilometers on one of them isn't really
acceptable let me escalate this and we will get back to you as soon as i you know get to a manager
or whatever the story was. i'll post a screenshot on the screen there. a week goes by and i'm one
of those people who i set calendar reminders for [ __ ] everything. so i follow up with them i say
hey it's been a week i haven't gotten no updates from you guys like what's going on? nothing.
so i just set my calendar on repeat. a week goes by we're on week two now. i send a message again
hey i've heard nothing from you guys what's going on? nothing silence right there they're at this
point i'm like are these guys just avoiding me? so the next time my reminder goes off i say i call it
my buddy and i'm very naive at this point so i'm like you know what, i'll give them the benefit of
the doubt maybe there's just something wrong with my email address maybe the system blocked me or
something i don't know. so i asked my buddy who bought the second bike i said hey would you mind
sending them an email because maybe they just aren't getting emails from me? and he sends him
an email and of course they ignore him too. so at this point now i got to escalate it because again
[ __ ] around and find out so we escalate it which is basically me just finding every single platform
where you can ever review this company and leaving them a review basically saying hey like
this is what happened, this motor makes a sound, please get back to me it's been three weeks,
nothing. i checked back a couple days later there are new replies like new reviews since mine and
they've been replying to the new reviews they've just been ignoring my review. at
this point now i know that they are definitely just ignoring me purposefully. i know that you
know there's no more being naive these guys are just deliberately avoiding me. fine. now i gotta
escalate it because there's like facebook groups for people who have this bike so i reach out on
these facebook groups and i just share the story of what happened to let other people know like hey
you might not want to mess with these guys i know they're the only people who carry this bike
um but you know here's my experience. someone sends me a dm and says hey adrian
why don't you file a claim with your credit card company? they'll probably give you your money
back. and i'm like what? apparently i didn't know this so you guys might already know this
you might be way ahead of me in life i was brand new to this so this was very new to me.
apparently you can just file a dispute with a credit card company and just say hey this
isn't right and the credit card companies which i guess makes sense have a whole department there
to look into it which is amazing. so i'm reaching out to the credit card companies
and basically they say okay send us like a copy of the invoice along with your credit card number
and some sort of transaction information. i give them all that. and we'll reach back. so they reach
back and they say you know we take your dispute to the merchant and the merchant has denied this so
there's no problem with bikes that same day i get an email back at this point we're like six weeks
seven weeks later maybe i can't remember because i'm riding right now. all of a sudden
leon cycle has found my emails and they say oh sorry your emails got lost.
i'm like what how do my emails get lost? um and we would like to send you a new motor now
they just said just a new motor no financial conversation no we're gonna cover the cost of
you know getting this new motor replaced... so i call back visa i'm like do i have to like take
this? and the visa ladies said no, apparently a lot of these merchants are going just slow enough
that um sorry taking just long enough that you run out of time for being able to charge
back the the credit card charge and they do whatever they can to try and stall for time,
and basically my visa lady said without telling me directly, that she would be very surprised if
that wasn't what this company was trying to do, given that it seems very suspicious that only now
are they actually getting back to me when they had six weeks and five reviews and six emails from two
different email accounts, et cetera et cetera you guys get what i'm saying. so i said what happens
next? and she says all you have to do is get an expert letter. what does that mean expert letter
for the credit card company means some sort of third party that basically verifies what you're
saying? so some sort of neutral party has to come in there and just say adrian paid for this, or you
paid for this, what instead you got was that. this is why it's not the same thing. this is the issue
so luckily my local husqvarna dealer also sells the husqvarna electric bicycles. i brought the
e-bikes to them, the fat electric bikes to them, and i said hey can you take a look at this and
tell me if you know they both seem right and they said well obviously there's damage but
you know most importantly one of them the motor sounds like it's a disaster, so i get this in a
letter, and i get this letter and i fax it to visa and the funny thing about td visa is they don't
do email attachments, you literally have to have a fax machine and fax them all of this documentation
that they ask you for, which is ridiculous but that's a whole other story so whatever.
and here's one more thing that you should know when you do a credit card dispute you don't get
like some of the money back you get all of the money back or none of it. it's it's an all or
nothing deal. what are you doing? so when i first reached out to these guys i wasn't expecting more
than like maybe 100 bucks for the damage maybe a new motor in case anything goes wrong with
the first one and that's about it, and well let's just say about a month goes by and i show up for
christmas at my buddy's house, the guy who bought the other electric fat bike and i just give him a
big wad of cash because visa ruled in our favors and we got our money back. so long story short if
anyone's ever trying to mess with you and they're a merchant or you're just suspicious of you know
dealing with a shady character pay by credit card even though i hate credit cards, pay by credit
card just turn around pay it off right away, but just that way you know that you have a little bit
of protection so if you are being [ __ ] around, you can file a dispute, you can protect yourself.
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