Part 7 - What Now?

Life goes on, I suppose, but there are a lot more stories of shady dealings with Amy. Many of which can be found by doing a simple Google search. As people come forward I will do my best to vet their stories and gather supporting evidence. Stories which make the cut will be featured on this blog. Those that don’t will likely still be sha­­red on the facebook group linked at the top of this page.

For those who still haven’t been made whole by Amy Donoho, there may yet be steps you can take to get your money back. First I’ll tell you what steps I took so you can decide for yourself if you need to pursue other means or of my method may work for you.

Firstly, I made the mistake of thinking Amy was a good person. Because of this I understood that Paypal would take fees out of any money I sent her so I felt that sending the money with the “friends and family” option would be a good way to save her some money. Little did I know that this option voids all Paypal buyer protections. So, if you paid her any money via Paypal, and used the friends and family method, then your options to secure a refund are severely limited. You may as well not even call Paypal as they will do nothing for you. What Paypal did say though is that my bank may be able to dispute the charge, and if they did that Paypal would work with them to get the charge reversed.

Unfortunately my bank wouldn’t do anything either. They cited two reasons; 1) they don’t offer protection from unsatisfactory purchases, they only protect against fraudulent charges and 2) it had been over the time limit for their ability to do anything. At this time I can’t remember if that was 30, 60, or 90 days. It had been over 150 days since the transaction when I called the bank. This means that if you used a bank transfer or your Paypal balance, your options are pretty much nill.

Where you do have options is if you used the standard Paypal method. In this case you have 180 days to file a claim with Paypal. Since Amy started collecting the Nassau excursion money in late July that timeframe is soon ending. The other potential option you have (even if you paid with the friends and family method) is if your funding source was a major credit card (NOT a bank account or debit card). Most major credit cards have excellent buyer protection policies which grant you the ability to dispute charges simply because you are dissatisfied with the purchase even if you did actually receive the product or service. If you’re not sure how you paid I would contact Paypal and your bank or credit card company ASAP.

Since none of the above methods worked for me, the only option I had was to repeatedly request the refund on facebook. Since posts in the groups about refunds kept getting deleted we had to use messenger. Finally after a few weeks, and many excuses, Amy finally gave me a refund on January 2nd. I asked her to pay me with the friends and family method, partly because I didn’t want to eat the fees, but more importantly I already knew she couldn’t be trusted and I also knew she could dispute the charge up to 180 days later. If you do manage to get a refund out of her be sure she either reverses the original charge OR she uses the friends and family method, otherwise you’re subject to having to trust her not to pull something later on down the road.

If she does pay you via the standard method you have to decide if you’re willing to eat the fees and take your chances on fending off a possible dispute in the future or if you want to reverse it and request her to resubmit it without fees.

I wish you all the best. Please check back for future installments where we discuss stories from others about Amy and Elizabeth, and we’ll reveal what we’ve learned by doing some background research on the two of them. And, we'll keep spreading the word to help ensure nobody else loses any money.

My final post in any Sea Cruisers group...

Part 8 - Moving Forward