E-mail Exchange: Lloyd and John

These emails happened during and following March, 2011. They are posted here, in the past, because we are not particularly interested in them. We just want them to be available to anyone else who is being taken by John Harlan.

Original letter from John Harlan:

Dear Lloyd Sommerer,

My name is John Harlan and it is my understanding that you recently had a very negative experience with my company regarding a returned eBay purchase. Your experience with my company was brought to my attention last night when another customer sent me a link to the blog you have posted! I was almost as horrified as I am sure you were when you opened the box to find nothing but trash inside! THIS IS NOT HOW WE DO BUSINESS and I want to assure you that I am taking this matter extremely seriously!!!!! I employ approximately 10 individuals’ each tasked with different responsibilities. Currently there are only two individuals who are tasked with dealing with returns and rest assured that I will be speaking with them regarding this matter!!!!

I would greatly appreciate the chance to try and work out something to compensate you for the major inconvenience that you have experienced! I was also wondering if you could perhaps forward me any emails that you received regarding this item return as I hope it will help me identify the individual responsible for this outrageous act.

Please accept my sincere apology!!!

John Harlan

Second letter from John about two weeks later

Dear Mr. Lloyd Sommerer,

I am writing to you as a courtesy and to give you the chance to comply before any potentially unnecessary and expensive legal proceedings.

I previously wrote you an email making an offer to compensate you for the inconvenience you have experienced as a courtesy and I was never responded too. To be clear if the posting titled “Shame on you John Harlan” is not removed within 24 hours I will instruct my attorney to file the paper work needed sue you for libel and I will be asking for the amount of $50,000 compensation for lost business in the appropriate court in your area.

This is your only chance to avoid having to defend yourself in a lengthy and expensive civil suit.

I strongly suggest that you ask yourself if it is worth the time you will be faced to take off from work the potential of unsuccessfully being able to defend yourself and being ordered to pay $50,000 not to mention attorney’s fees are you willing to risk all that to defend your right to post a blog ?

Sincerely,

John Harlan

P.S.

Personally if I were in your shoes I would comply with my request especially considering the fact that you have admitted that you cannot provide the proof needed to adequately defend yourself in a lawsuit. You admit that you received a full refund from PayPal and ultimately lost nothing so I hope you would agree with me when I say I don’t see the need to create a problem where one does not have to be created!

Lloyd’s first reply

John,

We were originally satisfied that you got to keep the monitor and that we received the money from you. Sure, you tried to cheat us out of both the monitor and the money, but in the end you had to pay for the monitor, so perhaps you learned a lesson and there was no real harm done.

This was the only thing that kept us from sending the police report from our local authorities to your local authorities with a request that they attempt to recover our stolen monitor. Only recently did we discover that this was not the case. That the money that we received was PayPal’s money and not your money after all.

I can’t help but think that you are just digging a deeper hole for yourself here. If you don’t have money to cover the cost of a monitor, I’m not sure that you’re going to be able to afford a lawyer to prosecute your case. There are attorneys who will take your case for a share of the settlement, but they will ask you to tell them the details and you’ll have to decide if you’re going to mention to them the findings of the police report. You could not mention it, but I’m pretty sure that it will come up in the course of the proceedings.

You see, for defamation to be considered libel, it has to be a lie. And so the court will ask you to point to a lie that has been printed about you. You will have to be specific, and then the police report will come to light. And yes, we still have all of your packaging, and if you were not careful, it probably contains your fingerprints. It will probably prove necessary to contact your recent buyers, and they might be in possession of a monitor that you had never paid for. That would be awkward.

John, we’re not doing this to prove a point. We’re doing it to help other people avoid being put in the same position that were were put in.

Just out of curiosity, what part of the post do you consider libelous? Is there a fact that you think is incorrect? I would not be opposed to changing anything that is incorrect.

Lloyd

John’s reply

Very well then I will provide you with a copy of the suit by Monday Morning
and I don’t need a lawyer I am a 4th year law student I have enough
experience under my belt to represent my self !!!

Look I have 10 employee’s is it theoretically possible that it did arrive like that yes I suppose however I do know that when I gave it to my employee to ship back the scree was in the box. I mean you have seen my feedback it is impeccable not a single complaint that has not been taken care of. I have been a member of PayPal since 2004 don’t you think they would have kicked me off if this was a common occurrence a long time ago.

The bottom line is this blog of yours is effecting my business and I am here willing to try and work something out with you to resolve the issue but I will sue you if I must and I might not win but I do know that if we do have to have to enter into a legal battle it will be both time consuming and expensive for the both of us !!!

Is there any type of deal that we can reach to avoid having to take this to court ?

John

another letter from John that same night

The problem is I don’t know how I can prove that the last time I saw it the screen was in there and from what I have read you can’t prove that you did not pack those items yourself. I have no doubt the box has my finger prints on it but I am sure it has yours on their as well.

A polygraph is not amicable in count so you and I both would have to spend a lot of time and expense in something that neither of us might win so lets please try to come to some agreement regarding this matter!!!

John

Lloyd’s reply

John,

Originally, I was going to write about the other things that would make proving that you had no personal knowledge of what was done an uphill battle, but I am a little concerned that sharing that information with you will make it harder for someone else to defend themselves if they are in a similar situation in the future. However, if the matter comes before the court, the I’m sure the police report will make most of that public knowledge anyway.

Frankly, I’m not sure how we can come to an amicable conclusion to this. Our usual interactions with people are based on trust, and over the last several months you have lost nearly all credibility in our eyes. However, we are at least skeptically open to the possibility that your business and not you personally were responsible for the fraud that was committed.

With that possibility in mind, how would you see us moving forward in this matter?

Lloyd

John’s reply:

I am not sure I will need some time to think of something to try and resolve this, however I do think it is important that you know that I was never even notified by PayPal that there was a problem with the return. The only thing I got from them was an email stating that you the seller had appealed there ruling in the case and that there was no further action needed from me at that time. The email did not state the reason for the appeal so I had no idea there was even a problem until I saw your blog or well it was pointed out to me by another customer.

I can show you a screen shot from my Resolution Center They sent me two emails over the course of their investigation process but as you can see I provided them with no evidence to dispute your claim that the box was returned to you in the matter that your blog states PayPal handled the entire thing and never told me what was going on.

Had they told me what your claim was I certainly would have addressed the matter with you directly !!!

John

John sends another letter that same day:

Lloyd let me ask you this?

What is your goal here with this blog ? What are you trying to accomplish???

You have as you have already stated been fully refunded and I can tell by looking at the blog that you started it before there was a resolution to the problem and you getting your money back.

I have explained to you that the last time I saw that box it had the screen inside of it and I am more than willing to sign any legal documents stating that effect under the penalty of perjury.

I suppose in an attempt to end this matter I could write a public apology which would include the acknowledgement that it is possible that you in fact did receive the package but that I Have no direct knowledge or took no direct actions in any fraud that might have been committed.

You could post that to your blog

Let me know your thoughts on this please

John

Lloyd’s Reply

John,

My assumption is that you could see as much on PayPal as I could. When you created your dispute and extended the offer of a partial refund, I responded with an offer for a full refund, but said that I was open to other arrangements. At that same time I requested that you send pictures of the damaged packaging/items. A few hours later, you did not contact me. Instead you escalated your dispute to a claim. Perhaps you can see where this might look suspicious.

As to your question in your most recent email, the blog doesn’t really have a purpose. It’s more of a hobby. Just a collection of stories about our life. If you are asking specifically about the purpose of the posts about the monitor, they also make a good story. They also serve as a cautionary tale to anyone who reads them that they should be careful in their ebay buying and selling.

As more and more people contact us about their own problems in dealing with you on ebay, it makes it harder to accept that this is an isolated occurrence perpetrated by an employee. If it is, then you should seriously reconsider your hiring/training practices.

But I can think of one thing that would be in both of our interests, and would clear you of any and all wrong doing in this case. You could locate the employee who stole the monitor and have them return the monitor to us so that we could then return PayPal’s money. Alternately, they could keep the monitor and send $353.24 to PayPal as PayPal seems to be the party in this affair that currently has suffered a financial loss. We would want some confirmation of that from PayPal.

If that were to happen, then I think that we could easily rewrite the post in a way that would not, as you say, “effect your business.” Of course, we would hope that the other people who have been commenting on the post and contacting us via email could also point to happy resolutions to their problems as well.

If I might be so bold as to offer some personal advice. You will soon be in the position of looking for work as a lawyer, or whatever profession you choose to pursue. It is routine for employers to look at the online presence of potential employees. As more and more problems that people have had in dealings with you come to light, it will be harder to disassociate from mistakes that you might have made in your youth. At some point you might ask yourself whether any short term gains that are to be made, either from dishonest dealings or from allowing others to conduct such dealings in your name, are worth the future price that you might pay in lost employment opportunities.

Lloyd Sommerer

John’s last letter

I think at this time I would like to take you up on your second offer that is to contact PayPal explain the situation and offer to reimburse them for the amount of $353.24 however I am going to ask that once that takes place that you remove the posting in its entirety. The story alone regardless of how you post the outcome of the situation is damaging to my business or at the very least remove the posting and replace it with an over view of what took place and indicate that although you may have some personal doubts regarding the legitimacy of my claim that the situation has been resolved in a manner that all parties involved got what was owed to them.

I will need some contact information from you to pass on to PayPal as I very much doubt there privacy policy will allow them to look up your information for the purposes of this issue. I am thinking that the best way for this to be resolved is to have a PayPal employee contact you after the amount has been paid in full.

Please let me know your thoughts

John

Lloyd’s reply

John,

My suggestion was actually a bit more comprehensive than simply sending PayPal money. My suggestion was that you take whatever steps necessary to insure that your business does not put anyone else in the position that we, and apparently other people, have been put in lately. And then that you repay the parties that have suffered financially.

Ideally you would ascertain who in your organization was responsible for the fraud and send us a copy of the police report. Then contact the person at PayPal assigned to the claim, explain to them what happened, reimburse PayPal and have PayPal contact us confirming that they were reimbursed.

If that were to happen, then I would rewrite the posts in such a way that everyone could tell that you were not personally responsible and that once you discovered what had happened, you took steps to ensure that no one was financially hurt by your rogue employee and that occurrences like this could not happen in the future. I believe that the posts could be rewritten in a way that presents your business as responsive to customers and willing to take whatever steps are necessary to see that everyone that you deal with is treated fairly.

But I am not entirely sure that all of that is worth your time and effort. As I am sure that you have already taken steps to ensure that your customers are not subject to fraud, you actually have little to gain by having these posts removed or rewritten. Because your business is so intimately tied in with eBay, the only person who would take the time to search for your ebay usernames, your name or your company name are people who feel that they were abused by you or your company. If there are no longer people who feel that way, then the posts do your business no harm.

However, I can understand where you would not want someone casually searching for your name to come across something that you were responsible for as an employer, and not so personally involved with. So perhaps you will want to take the time to resolve this in a manner that all parties will find satisfactory.

If, for some reason, it is not possible for you to send us a police report concerning your rogue employee, then I would be open to hearing other suggestions for how you can ensure us that this sort of thing is no longer going to happen to people.

Lloyd Sommerer