In search of relief from neck pain, Dr Norm Sanders was caught in a pillow scam orchestrated in another continent.
MY NECK was stiff and I blamed my ancient pillow. I searched 'orthopaedic pillows' and came across a catchy website, populated with lovely, happy women. Derila pillows. Glowing reviews, 70 per cent discount. Australia Post logo.
There were also logos from NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox News and others with the caption: 'ergonomic pillow benefits'. (No mention of Derila, but I didn't notice at the time.)
How could anything go wrong? On 4 February, I placed an order for a pillow. Cost $61, plus shipping. A message immediately popped up in my inbox from Derila confirming my order. This was obviously an efficient outfit. I scrolled down to the bottom and was dumbfounded. There was a charge of $165 for four pillows!
Outrageous. I sent an email to Derila demanding that it cancel my order and refund my money immediately.
Derila came back with:
Thank you for contacting the Derila customer support team. We value your business and want to ensure that you have a clear understanding of what you have ordered. Upon checking, you have ordered a total of four Derila pillows. To ensure a smooth transaction, we have attached the invoice for your reference. Your trust in us is highly appreciated... Best Regards, Mary.
I tried again and Mary offered me a bunch of gifts, including a Huusk Cookbook (limited edition) and a Nuubu Detox Guide.
Not to be bought off, I sent another email demanding a refund. Mary said that nothing could be done because the order had already gone through. I soon found out that they had extracted my money just as quickly.
PayPal sent me a notice that I had paid $165 to someone named Ausica UAB. Not Derila. I looked up Ausica UAB and discovered that it was located in Lithuania and had one employee, presumably the hardworking Mary. The whole thing was sounding fishy.
I decided to check the web: 'Derila scam'. Social media sites are buzzing with complaints about Derila. Mostly about being charged for four pillows. Some complained they were billed up to $400 for additional unordered items. One unfortunate soul was charged for six pillows. Then there were the few lucky Derila customers who managed to convince Mary to give them a refund, but only after the pillows were returned to Lithuania — at a cost of over $100.
On 5 February, I instructed PayPal to dispute the Ausica UAB claim. This triggered an avalanche of emails. I started to notice the language often seemed slightly odd.
I fired up my search engine, which introduced me to chatbots. I learned that chatbots mimic human conversation using artificial intelligence: 'conversational AI'. Businesses commonly use chatbots to help customers with customer service, inquiries and sales.
Chatbots can be programmed to respond to certain keywords in a specific way and machine learning can be used to train chatbots to respond organically. So Mary and her successors, Jennifer, Linda, Daphne, Patricia, Priscilla and Elizabeth, weren't real people after all. (It looks like the names came out of a baby name book.)
What about the Lithuanian connection? Lithuania is a small country on the Baltic, sandwiched between the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad and Latvia. Once an independent nation, it was annexed by Russia in 1940. It remained in the Soviet Union until 1990, when it gained independence. Putin would like to get it back, but it is now a member of NATO.
While Lithuania was in the Soviet Union, Russians were encouraged to migrate to the country. Many are still there. The Lithuanian border is open to its western neighbour Belarus, which has close ties with Russia.
Lithuania holds the 11th position globally for the ease of a parent company opening businesses to gain access to markets otherwise unavailable because of sanctions or other reasons. Registration as a limited liability company is simple and quick and generally takes 22 days.
Derila's slick website, clever chatbots and order manipulation would be elementary stuff for Russia's hackers and trolls. When Russia set out to interfere with the 2016 U.S. election, it went all out.
It probed state voter databases for insecurities and hacked the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic National Committee. Russians also released politically damaging information on the internet; spread propaganda on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, and staged rallies in Florida and Pennsylvania. Things will be as bad or worse this year.
Expectations are that generative AI tools will play a major role.
According to CrowdStrike:
'AI’s continuous development will undoubtedly increase the potency of its potential misuse — particularly within the scope of information operations and especially for less digitally literate audiences.'
The exchange with the robotic Derila ladies continued, eating into my 30-day return window. Finally, on 14 February, I caved in and told PayPal to terminate my complaint. Not that PayPal had seemed overly concerned about my paying for four pillows when I had ordered just one. It only wanted to know if the merchandise was damaged, which I could not know since I was afraid to open the package and jeopardise the refund.
Emails went back and forth at a snail's pace with Derila often taking three days or more to reply.
On 19 March, I wrote:
'It has been over a week since your last email. Please send the information about returning the pillows so we can put this time-wasting exercise behind us. (30 emails so far or 31 counting this one.)'
Linda thanked me for my response.
Derila was obviously trying to run the clock down. The company then said it couldn't refund me because of a “chargeback” with both PayPal and my bank. I rang PayPal and Westpac and of course, there was no chargeback.
Finally, after a total of 38 emails, Elizabeth wrote:
'We understand your frustration and we want to clarify that, as per our previous communication, due to the ongoing dispute regarding your order, we are unable to process any further requests until the dispute process is resolved. Have a great day, Elizabeth.'
Of course, the payment dispute had been resolved much earlier, but the return window was now definitely closed. On close inspection of the pillow packaging, I discovered a tiny, printed 'Made in the PRC' tucked away in a corner along with the company name. It wasn't Ausica, but 'Convenity UAB'. A search yielded that Convenity was also in Lithuania.
The main activity of Convenity is online stores; the number of employees is one (Mary again, no doubt) and the sales revenue in 2022 was zero. Russian businesses operate freely in Lithuania. With only one employee in Lithuania, Ausica/Convenity probably has its headquarters in Russia, like many other Russian firms in the country.
As there was no hope of ever getting a refund, I finally road-tested the pillow. It was comfortable enough, but my neck pain remained, having been made worse by my stressful battle with the Derila lady chatbots.
If anyone really wants a Derila pillow, Amazon has them cheaper and without any hassles whatsoever.
Caveat emptor!
Dr Norm Sanders is a former commercial pilot, flight instructor, university professor, Tasmanian State MP and Federal Senator.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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