I ordered 10 berry plush diapers from this woman back in August of last year. These diapers were subsequently promised to approximately 20 other mothers (in various quantities from 1-all 10). I paid this woman $150 for the lot and NEVER received the diapers. This occurred on a website called DiaperSwappers and once many of us realized we had been scammed the controllers on the website closed her down and helped us get useful information from each other so that we could file complaints with internet fraud and many of us decided to post here to help others avoid losing money.
I'm out $150 dollars in an economy that has only gotten worse since this occurred. She made off with thousands of dollars of many women's hard earned money. It seems that she possesses the ability to determine just how much she can take and get away with it.
She sent me an email about 2 months after all of this started... Seeing as this is now 2009 and about 5 months to the day of the occurrence I am all but assured I will never see my money again.
This is the email:
"To start off, I do apologize for any inconvience that has occurred due to the over selling of diapers. I did have the fullest intentions on sending out cloth diapers that I had listed on Diaperswappers.com. I immediately contacted Pay pal to have this taken care of. I don't know where people are getting their information from but I have never sold anything on Ebay, Craigslist, or any other online website. I DO not have over 100 claims against me on paypal. I did not collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in diapers. I did possess and had full intention on sending out the cloth diapers I had for sale. I NEVER used different alias names, I only used Michelle Hidalgo - never ever claimed to be anyone but myself. And yes, we did just have a baby via C-section.
I NEVER emptied out my paypal account. My funds on paypal were frozen because my paypal account was not verified, and in order to verify my paypal account I needed to connect it to a Bank Account and a Credit card. My husband and I do not possess any credit cards, therefore we had to apply for credit cards, receive them, hook them up with paypal - which is a long process. (for all of you that have hooked up a credit card and got it verified through paypal know the process).
So when claims were charged against me through paypal - I did try to refund them but, paypal would not allow me to touch any of my funds, whether it be sending, receiving, refunding, etc. So I could not do an automatic refund. I contacted paypal, and they informed me that the best thing is to allow the refund process to take place, and they would refund all of the complaints that were filed against me. Also, we received tons of threatening emails - threatening the safety and the privacy of my family and friends. People had contacted all my friends/family - postings all over the internet with false statements. The whole situation had been taken to a unsafe level - so we met up with a lawyer and also communicated with paypal and decided the best solution was to allow all the complaints that were filed against me through paypal & diaper swappers to take place, and allow them to be refunded. Then we will be paying paypal any additional funds owed. This method is the safest form of payment at this time because there will be documentation to protect all parties. If the threatening emails continue we will have to proceed with legal action - due to the threatening remarks insinuating harm to our children. We have contacted the authorities about those threats and now have recorded the complaint.
All of my funds on paypal have been sent to Buyer Dispute with PayPal - so I do not have the control over my own funds. I would love to automatic refund to you, but paypal has taken over my account and I no longer have control over giving refunds to everyone. But I ensure you we are contacting paypal on a regular basis and are working on releasing my funds to refund you.
So in conclusion all parties are going to be refunded thru paypal, we have been communicating with paypal the whole time and are finally nearing the end of this unfortunate situation. It is also very unfortunate that some of the women that did not receive their diapers feel the need to go to extreme lengths such as threatening my family and posting lies about myself
Instead of going through the process of getting their money back which is what I have done since the beginning.
Michelle Hidalgo"
From what we can ascertain she also "bought" diapers from other mothers and either didn't pay them or those funds were taken back by her when she lied and said she never received the diapers from the honest mamas! She is a thief. This is undeniable. You cannot promise diapers to people that you do not in fact possess and if you do not refund the money to the people you did not send diapers to, you STOLE from them. It isn't slander if it's the truth...
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