Neko Anthem Took my money and tried to run with it. Brooklyn New York

It was my birthday month and I wanted to pre-order a collectible figure I'd had my eyes on. Neko Anthem had the best price in the Google search results, and I was happy to be ordering from a small business, so I placed my pre-order through their website. A few weeks after the release date, I still hadn't received the item I pre-ordered or even gotten a shipping notification. I reached out to Neko Anthem by email and got no response. Several more attempts to contact them went nowhere.

What I should have done in the first place was check their reviews, but when I finally did, I found a ton of other people telling the same story on their Facebook page, in their Instagram comments, on Twitter, and in Google reviews: they ordered something through the website, it never showed up and nobody answered their emails about it.

After ten days of no response I gave them an ultimatum: If I didn't have the item, a shipping notification or a refund in 24 hours I would dispute the charge with my bank. They responded with a refund receipt within hours, meaning they had probably been reading my e-mails this entire time and just hoping that I would give up or not know how to fight them. I'm reasonably sure at this point that this is their business strategy-- just hoping people don't know what to do when someone shamelessly rips them off and there's no easily accessed structure like Amazon customer support to get their money back.

The "refund" receipt was, as far as I can tell, fake. Over two weeks later, the money still hadn't been returned to my account. I had to dispute the charge with my bank.

I would have been completely willing to be understanding and patient if this had been some kind of covid-related delay, or a problem with USPS, or basically, anything else reasonable that was explained to me. But instead, they chose to ignore me until I got loud, and then lie to me to try to get me off their backs, and it looks like they've been repeatedly pulling this same scam for at least the last year.