posted 12-09-2020 05:33 PM               

After attending the screening of "2001: A Space Odyssey" at Spacefest 2019, I decided to preorder their $1000 replica of HAL 9000. It was supposed to ship by winter 2019, but there were massive delays, and I just learned that the company has declared bankruptcy and will not be producing the items.

This HAL project originally started on a crowdfunding site, and all of those backers are completely out of luck. However, I ordered mine from their official site. Does anyone know if I have even the slightest chance of a refund? I don't think VISA will honor a chargeback request after 18 months. Do I have any options at all?

posted 12-09-2020 06:06 PM               

This has angered a lot of sci-fi fans who also lost out. I've read that Master Replicas had $650,475 in pre-sale money from various items.

quote:

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Originally posted by hbw60:
I hope none of you are in the same situation!

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posted 12-09-2020 06:23 PM               

It actually gets worse. That $650,475 was only from the initial crowdfunding campaign. After that, they continued to sell them on the website. They sold out their entire run of 2,001 Command Consoles, which were $1250 each (or $1000 on a sale). So the actual amount they took in was between $2,000,000 and $2,500,000. And that's just for the Command Console version. They also sold an even larger edition of the regular version. So that could put it closer to $5,000,000.

And they were allowed to declare Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which is even worse, because it totally wipes their slate clean. In the initial bankruptcy filing, they claimed that the company had absolutely no money left, which seems impossible. As far as we can tell, not a single model was ever produced.

It's been over a year, but my bank did allow me to file a dispute on the charge, which is a good sign. I'm still expecting them to refuse it after this long, but there's a bit of hope. But even if I get my money back, they still got $1000 from me, which is so upsetting.

posted 12-10-2020 12:55 PM               

Even with the best intentions, you hear stories of these sellers having all kinds of personal issues and then getting mad at the "Dude, where's my stuff?" contacts. Each time, I'm left baffled as to how the seller should think the buyer should care about any of that?

It's easy to fall behind when you make stuff yourself or are at the mercy of small company suppliers. But in the end, that is not the buyer's problem. It's the primary reason I quit making stuff for the WW2 re-enacting community, because it got annoying to get emails asking when I'd start making something specific again. But I never took money for something I didn't have one hand to ship (or could make in a few days). Nobody can say I shafted them, and that's because I never set myself up for failure.

The problem here is that, you never know if this was something that got out of hand or was intentional. When you see the same players over and over again doing it, the reason becomes clear. I think that in some cases, it's not intentional at first, but then they realize money can be gotten for nothing if you know how to play it. That seems to be the case here.