Reader Daryl writes:

“Bought a PS3 from my local Best Buy yesterday. When I got it home I found out it was broken. On boot up it would say “Need to restore hard drive, press X to continue”. Pressing X would cause it to say “Restoring…” then after a few seconds it would restart, and would come up to the same exact thing, and repeat.
So, I take in my broken PS3 to Best Buy today, to replace it of course, and they refused to because the serial number on the console is different from that of the box. They accuse me of trying to trade back a different PS3 than the one I bought (I guess there are idiots that do that), in order to get out of paying to have it replaced. This, of course, is total crap because I bought this EXACT PS3 the night before.

I’m pretty sure I’ve figured out what they are trying to do. See, before, people were getting away with trading in their, out of warranty, broken PS3’s. This means that Best Buy had many PS3’s that were broken, and had different serial numbers than the boxes they were in (Which, is only their fault because they didn’t check the serials on return). Normally Best Buy would just send these PS3’s back to Sony and get reimbursed. Problem is, Sony won’t reimburse for PS3’s with different serial numbers then the box. So, what is Best Buy to do with all these broken PS3’s with different serial numbers than the boxes? Well, resell the PS3 to the customer, in order to make back their 400 dollars. Once that’s done, the customer can’t prove anything, and now has to go to Sony in order to get their problem solved. In the end, Best Buy gets their 400 dollars, and doesn’t have to back up the product they sell, and the customer is stuck with the problem. I will be calling Sony to figure out what’s up with these serial numbers, but I’m not going to let Best Buy get away with this. They are the ones at fault, and I’m going to get my PS3 from them.”

It’s a nice thought, but if we were you we’d save ourselves some time and aggrivation by calling our credit card company and explaining what happened. Changes are that they will either advise you to do a chargeback against Best Buy for fraudulently selling you a broken, used PS3 with an incorrect serial number, or, they’ll replace your item under their own purchase protection plan. You see, they know you paid $400 for a PS3 the other day, and that’s really all they care about.

Make sure to have all your receipts and relevant information at hand and then give them a call.

The more we see complaints like this, the more we realize that you absolutely must check your items while you’re still inside Best Buy. They will literally sell you a box full of shower tiles instead of a hard drive and no amount of complaining and filing police reports and reporting them to your state’s attorney general will make them realize that it’s fraud. Way it goes.

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