This #throwbackthursday we're going down memory lane and sharing a story of when a gang of Islamabadi women that were scamming online businesses decided to target us. 

It was a typical Friday morning at work when the phone rang. It was a screaming, raging woman dropping all kinds of f-bombs and worse claiming she had ordered a bag from Secret Stash and instead she got a box of old, dirty clothes.

We told her this was impossible and to give us a few minutes to investigate the matter. When we called our courier partner, they told us that the package was still with them and in fact the customer had specifically asked them to hold on to it and deliver it later that afternoon.

This was getting weirder by the minute but to prove it, the courier company sent us a picture showing the package was packed as we had sent it and still very much with them.

Meanwhile, when we looked more closely at the picture the customer sent, the package she was claiming we had sent her wasn't even by a courier company we use. It also had a different shipping address, telephone number and even the city was different.  

When we pointed all this out and calmly tried to explain that perhaps someone else was doing this, the customer refused to listen. She kept threatening and cursing us in English and Urdu (Urdu gaalis definitely sound worse) saying we were scamming her and she was going to come after us and get hundreds of thousands of Rupees to compensate for this. 

It got stranger as we were on the phone with her, we were simultaneously getting orders on our website with the same shipping address placed under different names. 

Despite all the threats, we stood our ground and respectfully told her that she can say what she wants, but we're in the right and she can bring a legal case on us if need be. 

After many hours, the calls finally stopped. We blocked the IP address to stop the fake orders and got back to work. The worse seemed to be over until right before we were wrapping up for the day the phone rang again.

It was from a different unknown number so we picked it up. The person on the phone claimed to be the secretary of someone from a very famous Pakistani political family (shout out to my ex team member who hadn't heard of them LOL) and wanted to "discuss" the order issue from earlier in the day.

We realised it was the same people but decided to stay professional and started explaining the situation again. The conversation deteriorated quickly with her making all sorts of threats including kidnapping and extortion. We bravely said to stop making fake threats, though we were all definitely very freaked out and hung up.

Thankfully that was actually the last of it and we never heard from them again.

Interestingly enough a few weeks later we got a call from another e-commerce shop owner who had seen our statement on our social media channels about the incident and wanted to confirm with us before taking any further steps as he was going through the same thing. 

It turned out this was definitely the same group of people using the same MO to scare businesses into falling for their scam and sending them money or free products. 

Let's just say we can laugh about it now but when you're running an online business in Pakistan you deal with all sorts of people and have to always be vigilant!