Swaptree backs down

I’m a huge fan of Book­Mooch, an free book trad­ing web­site. The web­site lets you put your old books up for trade. If some­one requests a book, you send it to them at your own expense and receive a credit to get a book from another user. When you request a book from some­one else, they send it to you at their expense. The sys­tem works great.

Unfor­tu­nately, I ran out of items to “mooch” on Book­Mooch, so I looked for a sim­i­lar site and found Swap­tree. Swap­tree is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. Instead of accu­mu­lat­ing and spend­ing points, your trade is done real time. For exam­ple, maybe you have a copy of Ender’s Game that you want to get rid of, and you really want The DaVinci Code. Bill wants Ender’s Game but only has Where the Red Fern Grows. Susan wants Where the Red Fern Grows and has a copy of The DaVinci Code. Swap­tree mag­i­cally fig­ures out that a trade can occur between these 3 users and sets it up.

Sounds great, huh? It is, until a book gets lost in the mail. Although the USPS is gen­er­ally pretty awe­some at get­ting mail to its des­ti­na­tion, it occa­sion­ally loses pack­ages, espe­cially those shipped Media Mail (the cheap­est way of send­ing books). Users of Book­Mooch rec­og­nize this and, unless it becomes habit­ual for a user, don’t get too upset when their books don’t arrive.

Swap­tree, how­ever, sends threat­en­ing let­ters. Back in May I sent a book that didn’t make it to its intended recip­i­ent. As men­tioned before, that hap­pens occa­sion­ally. But instead of chalk­ing it up to bad luck, Swap­tree decided to send me an email let­ting me know that they intended to file an offi­cial mail fraud report with the United States Post Office. That’s bad. The USPS is known to stop deliv­ery of your mail in response to mail fraud reports.

Upon review­ing the form they were plan­ning on send­ing in, I noticed sev­eral problems:

• Swap­tree claimed that they were defrauded by one of their mem­bers not receiv­ing a book. This is ridicu­lous as I never agreed to send Swap­tree a book, and their terms of ser­vice clearly state that they are not involved in the trans­fer of goods between their users.
• Swap­tree claimed that my beat up copy of Robots of Dawn was some­how worth $20 to the recipient.
• Mail fraud requires intent to defraud. They have no evi­dence what­so­ever that I ever intended to defraud any­one. I even explic­itly posted on their site sev­eral times that the book was already sent.
• The form claimed that they con­tacted me twice about the miss­ing item when in fact they had only con­tacted me once (minor, but still a discrepancy).

I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty con­fi­dent that threat­en­ing to file a mail fraud com­plaint against some­one in this man­ner is black­mail. I sent a reply to Swap­tree let­ting them know that I’m pre­pared to take any legal actions nec­es­sary to pro­tect myself against libel and fraud­u­lent claims against my char­ac­ter. I included the above list (in greater detail) let­ting them know exactly why I thought they were being ridicu­lous. And then I waited.

One week later (4 days after the dead­line given in their threat), I received a reply:

Dear zulu­grid,

Thank you for your prompt response regard­ing the Item Not Received complaint.

In an effort to bet­ter serve our expand­ing user­base, we have auto­mated many of our processes, and the email you received was a result of one of these processes. We recently sent emails to a set of Swap­tree users with out­stand­ing trades, what we refer to as Items Not Received. These emails were sent indis­crim­i­nately, regard­less whether the user had 1 or 10 Items Not Received. We do clearly under­stand that items can get lost in the mail, as well as the unfor­tu­nate cir­cum­stance when a recip­i­ent claims they have not received an item when in fact they have.

We have given your trade in ques­tion fur­ther review and con­se­quently cleared the Item Not Received com­plaint. We do apol­o­gize for any mis­un­der­stand­ing and all appar­ent threat­en­ing lan­guage you were made sub­ject to in our auto­mated emails. Please real­ize that we are sim­ply try­ing to improve our ser­vice, and as small but grow­ing com­pany, we are con­stantly learn­ing along the way.

Once again, we apol­o­gize for the fault on our part and are in no way pur­su­ing or facil­i­tat­ing the pur­suit of any fraud reports in your name. We thank you in advance for your patience, dili­gence, and will­ing­ness to work with us as we con­tinue to improve our service.

Best Regards,
The Swap­tree Team
If you wish to unsub­scribe or mod­ify your email pref­er­ences, click on this link: http://www.swaptree.com/WebFrmMyAccountInfo.aspx

ECC1295213610013197635ECC ||zulu­grid||

So if you end up get­ting a threat­en­ing let­ter from Swap­tree, my advice is to assert your rights to not be threat­ened or harassed by “The Swap­tree Team” and they will likely back down.

Or just stick with Book­Mooch.