Monster Beat headphones from China cause a financial headache

I bought a pair of Monster Beats Solo HD headphones costing £124.87 from a website called beatsdrdre.co.uk. I was careful to use what I thought was a UK site, but the goods arrived from China.

I tried to register them, but they didn’t have a valid serial number, and the headband snapped after three weeks, leaving the phones unusable.

The retailer wouldn’t help so I logged a dispute with Paypal which found in my favour. I assumed the case was sorted, so closed the claim.

But the seller has not refunded the £100 and Paypal refuses to help any further because I closed the claim.
Pauline Parkman

Sadly we can’t get Mrs Parkman’s money back for her. Her mistake was to close the Paypal claim before the money had been refunded by either Paypal or this seller.

This means Paypal is no longer legally obliged to provide a refund and we very much doubt we will hear from the site owner.

Mrs Parkman said she was careful to use a UK site, so we decided to take a look at the website. The thing people have to be aware of is that just because the site has a .co.uk domain name, this doesn’t mean it is based in the UK.

There are things you need to look out for. By law there must be a geographic address and not a PO box number, so that the buyer knows where the company is based, and an email address. Oddly there doesn’t have to be a phone number.

We were not surprised that we could not see these details on the website. We were also not surprised to find several breaches of the Distance Selling Regulations in the terms and conditions; such as imposing a 25 per cent restocking fee for returned orders.

Mrs Parkman was able to give us the email address for after-sales support she had got when she placed her order. She also gave us Lui Zheng’s hotmail account, so we have emailed both to try to speak to someone.

We then contacted the official Beats By Dr Dre team to inform them of our concerns with this website and they agreed things did not look right.

“Unfortunately these don’t seem to be legitimate and at the moment there sadly seem to be quite a few counterfeit products on the market. The official Beats by Dr Dre site is www.beatsbydre.com, but we will of course let our client know about this site and look to have it taken down,” a representative for the company said.

We were also told that we can give Mrs Parkman the representative’s details, which we have done.