CI and PayPal: WTF?

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lupy1234

Starting to Get Obsessed
Jul 3, 2023
217
582
Hanover, PA
After the purchase, you have option to join a "discount club" where you get discounts at online stores. It's a monthly fee service, the price if I recall is $16.99. you might have opted in by mistake. It's a joke and messed up considering they are owned by STG.
 

woodsroad

Lifer
Oct 10, 2013
14,022
26,823
SE PA USA
Don't bother calling P&C/CI/STG, they don't care about their customers.
Appeal the PayPal decision, and file a dispute with the credit card used to pay PayPal. Then forward all your documentation to your state's consumer affairs office and/or attorney general's office.
Whether you choose to continue to do business with STG, including buying their products elsewhere, is entirely up to you, but....
 

ParkitoATL

Can't Leave
Mar 11, 2023
414
1,499
Atlanta, GA
I was going over my PayPal monthly statement and noticed a monthly subscription for $17 in my account for a company I'd never heard of.

I wasn't aware of any goods or services I'd subscribed to so I immediately looked up the obscure company reference - turns out it is some mega corporation that owned a lot of tobacco companies, one of which is "Pipes and Cigars".

I went to the P&C website to find the subscription to cancel it. Guess what, no subscription found! So I filed with PayPal to halt the subscription and resolve the screw up. After communicating with P&C they denied my claim, so PayPal sided with P&C and refused a refund.

This wasn't one of their wacky magazine subscriptions they hang on every order, it was something I can't explain.

They may have attractive prices but I lost money dealing with them.
Thompson Cigar is another peddler that is notorious for signing its customers up for "Cigar of the Month" clubs and BS like that.
 

Neo

Lurker
Oct 4, 2024
4
6
Houston
UPDATE:
Well they refunded my money. Maybe 20 emails back and forth, then there was PayPal, another 20 emails and phone calls.

Paypal operations is run by teenagers in some distant land. Clueless, useless, ineffective. The vendor eventually relented but PayPal would not transfer the funds.

Long story short, I was fully refunded and eventually got PayPal to relent and give me the funds back.

Hard won lesson learned. You have to work with the people that have the product, but be extremely careful.
 

Pipe_Guard

Might Stick Around
Jul 30, 2025
87
59
Ugh paypal is useless for record tracking.

Unless the transaction is done on paypal.com after you sign into your paypal account, and the money is sent to an actual paypal account number.. and the transer is listed as business/retail sale purchase

paypal wont do anything. I learned that the hardway on some computer components.