text: Image courtesy of Before the site went down for prolonged "maintenance" Accessory Outlet included a clause in its Terms of Sale that charged a $250 penalty to complaining customers. 
   
   Online Retailer Will Fine You $250 If You Even Threaten To Complain About Purchase 
   
   If you were put off by KlearGear.com’s ridiculous “Non-Disparagement” fee , which penalizes customers for sharing their bad shopping experiences with the public, another online retailer is apparently trying to go one further, by not only banning customers from saying bad things online, but by also forbidding them from even bringing up the threat of a complaint or a credit card chargeback. 
   
   —— 
   
   UPDATE: For more on the sketchy shenanigans of Accessory Outlet, check out this follow-up story. 
   
   UPDATE #2: On the morning of 8/29/2014, the various Accessory Outlet sites were all pulled down and replaced with a message saying they were “undergoing maintenance.” 
   
   —— 
   
   Buried at the bottom of the Terms page for OnlineAccessoryOutlet.com, you’ll find the following insanely overreaching stipulations (bolded for emphasis): 
   
   “You agree not to file any complaint, chargeback, claim, dispute, or make any public forum post, review, Better Business Bureau complaint, social media post, or any public statement regarding the order, our website, or any issue regarding your order, for any reason, within this 90 day period, or to threaten to do so within the 90 day period, or it is a breach of the terms of sale, creating liability for damages in the amount of $250, plus any additional fees, damages – both consequential and incidental, calculated on an ongoing basis.” 
   
   The Terms also claim the customer agrees that, even after the 90 days are up, the “sole method of dispute resolution in all cases… shall be binding arbitration to take place in New York City, with all expenses paid by the respective parties.” 
   
   So if your purchase is late, lost, damaged, broken, etc., and you even make the vague statement of “I’m going to write about this on Facebook” or “I’m going to call my bank to cancel this charge,” Accessory Outlet will tag you for $250. And even if you wait the full 90 days for that period to end, the only way to resolve the issue is by traveling — at your own expense — to New York City for an arbitration hearing. 
   
   And this is apparently neither a joke nor an exaggerated policy made in the hope that someone will be too scared of the fine to complain. 
   
   One Accessory Outlet customer in Wisconsin was fined the $250 for telling the retailer that she would issue a chargeback on her credit card because the $40 iPhone case she’d ordered hadn’t arrived after 10 days. And then when she refused to pay that fine, it was sent to collections. 
   
   The customer has sued Accessory Outlet in a New York state court, arguing that the $250 “debt” she is now being hassled over is bogus. According to the complaint [PDF], the “terms are unenforceable, both because they are unconscionable as a matter of law and because [the Plaintiff] never agreed to them.” 
   
   That last claim is the most obvious and the easiest to prove. Though the Terms are on the Accessory Outlet website, at no point in the purchase process is the customer required to check a box or otherwise acknowledge that the Terms have been read. We attempted to verify the Plaintiff’s claim by going all the way through the ordering process (up until actually hitting the “complete purchase” button, of course) and could not find any place in which it was even suggested that we read the Terms before placing an order. 
   
   According to the customer, she placed her order on July 6 of this year. Four days later, she received an e-mail saying her order had shipped. The customer then checked the supposed USPS tracking number of her order and found that it had not been received by the Postal Service. 
   
   When the item had not been received by July 16, she contacted the company via its website and requested that the order be canceled. Accessory Outlet replied that it could not be canceled because it had shipped. 
   
   The customer checked the USPS tracking number again and then replied to Accessory Outlet that she would be requesting a chargeback from her credit card company because she believed the retailer was lying about whether the order had actually shipped. 
   
   This is when they told her about the $250 fine that she hadn’t agreed to. 
   
   The company told her in an e-mail that not only would she be hit for the $250 penalty but that her account would be sent to a collections agency, which would “put a negative mark on your credit for 7 years and will also result in calls to you home and/or work.” 
   
   Accessory Outlet also threatened her with the prospect of “additional fees for any correspondence with your card issuer… billed to you on an hourly basis and a flat rate $50 fee for the dispute or claim.” 
   
   When the customer replied that she had the right to contact her credit card company, the retailer replied that she now owed them “damages” and that her account would be referred to “multiple collections agencies.” 
   
   After receiving additional, similar e-mails from Accessory Outlet, the customer responded that she was getting a lawyer. 
   
   To which the retailer replied: 
   
   “Contact your lawyer, spend more time and money if you wish. You will be billed and the amount we bill you for will continue to rise with every email and every second we dedicate o correspondence of any kind pertaining to your breach of the terms of sale. Thank you.” 
   
   A subsequent e-mail from Accessory Outlet personally attacks the customer and closes on a menacing tone: 
   
   “Read the agreement or have someone competent do so for you since your emails make it clear you did not read the agreement or do not understand the clauses contained therein. You obviously do not know how to use the tracking or are ignoring it… You are playing games with the wrong people and have made a very bad mistake given the legally binding contract we have in place. One we have successfully enforced on many individuals the same we will do with you.” 
   
   The customer eventually received her order — nine days after it supposedly shipped — and claims it was defective and unusable. Her complaints to Accessory Outlet received no response. 
   
   She seeks to have her alleged debts voided because she did not actively agree to the Terms of Sale, nor was she required to view them. Additionally, the customer claims the terms are unreasonably favorable to Accessory Outlet. 
   
   “I want to go online and warn other customers about Accessory Outlet’s unfair terms and shoddy products,” said the customer in a statement. “But I’m afraid Accessory Outlet will claim I owe it more money and try to ruin my credit.” 
   
   “Accessory Outlet is using unfair terms hidden in fine print, along with threatening emails, to bully a customer into keeping quiet about her bad experience with the company,” said Scott Michelman, the Public Citizen attorney handling the case. “But terms that prevent a customer from speaking publicly about her transaction and from contacting her credit card company are unreasonable and unenforceable.” 
   
   UPDATE: While we had assumed that Accessory Outlet’s touted “A+” rating from the Better Business Bureau was as real as the time I made out with Scarlett Johansson, a reader points us to the New York BBB site, where Accessory Outlet not only has an “F” rating, but where the BBB states in all caps that “THIS FIRM IS NOT CURRENTLY A BBB ACCREDITED BUSINESS,” and that it has been served a cease-and-desist demanding it remove the badge from the site. “As of August 19, 2014 this firm has not replied to BBB’s requests and continues to advertise the BBB name, logo, and incorrect rating on its website,” writes the BBB. 
   
   For fun and giggles, we’ve written to the three other organizations touted on the site — Angie’s List, buySAFE, and Trusted Shops — to confirm that these endorsements are also false. 
   
   We’ve heard back from a rep for buySAFE, who confirmed that Accessory Outlet is not certified. 
   
   “The seal you see is an old, bad copy of a buySAFE seal,” explains the rep. 
   
   And a rep for Angie’s List says there is no way Accessory Outlet could have won a Super Service Award — which requires perfect scores — because it has no reviews on the site. 
   
   “They have no reviews, which equals no grade,” explains the Angie’s rep. “They aren’t SSA winners and shouldn’t be using the badge.” 
   
   And a rep for Trusted Shops, which does not certify companies in the U.S. says Accessory Outlet is definitely not certified by the service. ||||| A Wisconsin woman has filed a lawsuit in New York state court against a shady online retailer, Accessory Outlet, which had threatened her by saying, “You are playing games with the wrong people” after she attempted to cancel an order for a $40 iPhone case that did not arrive on time. 
   
   The woman, Cindy Cox, is being represented by the advocacy group Public Citizen, which recently won summary judgment and damages of over $300,000 earlier this year in a related case in Utah involving the French parent company of KlearGear, a similarly unscrupulous vendor. She is seeking declaratory judgment that the company’s self-imposed “debt” of $250 is invalid and that the company engaged in deceptive practices. 
   
   “Accessory Outlet is using unfair terms hidden in fine print, along with threatening emails, to bully a customer into keeping quiet about her bad experience with the company,” Scott Michelman, the Public Citizen attorney handling the case, said in a statement. “But terms that prevent a customer from speaking publicly about her transaction and from contacting her credit card company are unreasonable and unenforceable.” 
   
   According to the civil complaint filed Wednesday, Cox is a disabled veteran of the United States Navy and is a substitute teacher for special needs children in the Kenosha Unified School District. 
   
   Accessory Outlet did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment. 
   
   “You agree not to file any complaint…” 
   
   The story begins on July 6, 2014, when Cox placed an order for $39.94 for an iPhone case. In so doing, she accepted to be bound by “all terms and conditions contained in [the site's] agreement,” which describes a refund policy and a privacy policy, but not the actual Terms of Sale that the company posts in a hard-to-find link at the bottom of the site. 
   
   Those terms include this provision: 
   
   You agree not to file any complaint, chargeback, claim, dispute, or make any public forum post, review, Better Business Bureau complaint, social media post, or any public statement regarding the order, our website, or any issue regarding your order, for any reason, within this 90 day period, or to threaten to do so within the 90 day period, or it is a breach of the terms of sale, creating liability for damages in the amount of $250, plus any additional fees, damages - both consequential and incidental, calculated on an ongoing basis. 
   
   On July 10, Cox received an e-mail from Accessory Outlet saying that her order had shipped and provided her with a tracking number. When Cox went to check the tracking number online, she discovered that the package was not being processed via the United States Postal Service. 
   
   Six days later, Cox e-mailed the company, asking that the order be canceled as it had not been received. Accessory Outlet informed her that the order could not be refunded as it had already shipped. When she checked the tracking number a second time and saw that the item had still not shipped, she informed the company that she would tell her credit card company to reverse the payment. 
   
   “Contact your lawyer, spend more time and money if you wish.” 
   
   Accessory Outlet responded with rhetorical force, saying that it would impose its aforementioned $250 penalty and would employ a collections agency to get its money. According to the complaint, the firm told her that “this will put a negative mark on your credit for 7 years and will also result in calls to your home and/or work." 
   
   “Further," the company told her, "additional fees for any correspondence with your card insurer will also be billed to you on an hourly basis and a flat rate $50 for the dispute or claim.” 
   
   Cox, undeterred, told the company not to threaten her and said that she would be contacting a lawyer and the Better Business Bureau. 
   
   Accessory Outlet responded the next day, July 17: “Contact your lawyer, spend more time and money if you wish. You will be billed and the amount we will bill you for will continue to rise with every email and every second we dedicate to correspondence of any kind pertaining to your breach of the terms of sale. Thank you.” 
   
   Cox discussed the transaction with her credit card company, but she opted to not dispute the charge on the off-chance that the item would finally arrive. She then informed Accessory Outlet that she had done so, to which it replied: 
   
   There is clear proof it was sent and left NY and we will have proof of delivery. The collections action is separate and based solely on breach of contract and will be done even though you paid for and received the merchandise due to your breach of the terms of sale. Read the agreement or have someone competent do so for you since your emails make it clear you did not read the agreement or do not understand the clauses contained therein. You also obviously do not know how to use the tracking or are ignoring it. Either way you will pay us $250 on top of the order total or have continuous calls to your home, cell, and/or work phones to collect the debt due. You are playing games with the wrong people and have made a very bad mistake given the legally binding contract we have in place. One we have successfully enforced on many individuals the same we will do with you. 
   
   On July 19, Cox finally received her iPhone case, but “it was warped and would not snap closed.”
target: – You think fining people $500 for a crummy hotel review is bad? OnlineAccessoryOutlet.com will take $250 from your pocket if you even threaten to leave a less-than-stellar review. Customers "agree not to file any complaint, chargeback, claim, dispute, or make ... any public statement regarding the order," or threaten to do so, within a 90-day period after their order, or they'll be fined the $250 "plus any additional fees [and] damages," according to the site's terms of sale, spotted by Consumerist. That's right: Tell the website you'll post about a late order on Facebook—even if you don't actually do it—and you're out hundreds of dollars. One Wisconsin customer, however, is fighting the fine. Cindy Cox was fined after informing the retailer she'd be requesting a chargeback when an iPhone case she ordered didn't seem to have shipped after the retailer said it had. When she refused to pay the fine, the retailer sent it to a collections agency and allegedly informed her, "This will put a negative mark on your credit for seven years and will also result in calls to your home and/or work." The site allegedly added, per Ars Technica, "You are playing games with the wrong people." Cox wasn't deterred. She filed a suit, which notes the "terms are unenforceable, both because they are unconscionable as a matter of law and because [the plaintiff] never agreed to them." Consumerist adds that, as far as it can tell, at no point during the purchase process are the site's terms even mentioned. (Click to read about a customer who was fined $3,500 three years after complaining online about an order that never arrived.)