[Monday, November 05, 2012] [05:56:27 PM] absolutely, and if I can't get them to properly cover the parcel I'll quite possibly end up covering a portion of the loss out of pocket in replacements

This is the standing offer I made to Kris on the same day I was told by our insurance company that they'd likely be unable to cover the cost of replacement. This offer was in place up until give or take the point that I saw him create a similar thread on the 17th of Feb at which point I lost patience with trying to help him. I always do my best to make sure each customer is satisfied, and that I've done everything I can to that end. Heck, as I type this, there are customers with insurance claims in various stages of processing that have already had a replacement shipped to them. That's exactly why I offered to cover at least a portion of the parcel's silver, and would have been very amenable to covering 100% of the replacement, but Kris never followed up with me about my offer even at the time that I made it. He'd just send "ping" and nothing else, and go offline before I could respond. He's had my email address since before he even placed an order, but aside from "ping" on IRC periodically he hasn't really been in contact with me regarding my offer. I got an email from him on 9/13 which I replied to, and then got nothing in my inbox until January 4th.


Yes, I flew off the handle a bit when I saw this thread: I worked Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Thanksgiving, my birthday, and New Years' Eve, New Years Day, et cetera, both this year and last. I generally work 6 or 7 days per week, and get 8 hours of sleep perhaps two nights out of the month. Instead of taking care of my financial needs, I invest every spare cent back into the company and staff, and vicariously my customers. Just one example of that is me to this day driving a car that is past the age of majority for voting, having children, drinking etc in many countries. In any possible way I help the company's growth via minimizing my own expenditures, and increase customer satisfaction by having a larger amount and variety of inventory in our vaults. So between Kris not even emailing me about the offer I made him before posting here, combined with the countless sacrifices I make as a general rule to help my customers, I of course took his accusation and the inaccuracies of his account very personally.

My apologies for losing my cool: I'm normally pretty even keeled, but this really rubbed me the wrong way in concert with some major personal stress over the last few weeks(very ill relative). Combined with the fact that I've had a standing offer to him for ages as far as taking care of him in metal or fiat, but instead of even asking me about it he just complains on here on the forums about 80btc, I really took it too personally and lost my temper. I didn't even mind the continual messages on IRC. What got to me was the lack of communication with us substantively via email or other mediums, but the effort put into fairly constant posting here of half-truths and fabrications instead. Look at the content and title of this thread, as well as his last thread: both inflationary and confrontational, demanding 80btc instead of replacement products as I offered him all the way back in November.


I'll put my offer back in place for Kris, since he IS our only failed insurance claim to date, throughout our entire history of thousands of parcels to countless countries. I always want every customer to have the best possible experience no matter what kind of exigent circumstances come into play. However, for the sake of posterity, I should make a few things clear:

-We don't self-insure parcels, for a variety of reasons. Insurance requires a high level of specialized interfacing to carriers, many hours of phone calls, and extensive fraud investigations. Not only would our ability to self-insure be subpar compared to the professional commercial offerings we utilize, but it would open us up to a huge potential for fraud and cause much higher shipping rates for our customers and decrease efficiency dealing with carriers/governments.

-We never use carrier insurance coverage- they specifically exclude precious metals via fuzzy language buried deep in the insurance disclaimers and policies.

-We always use private insurance that is specifically vetted for precious metals coverage and designed for higher than average value coverage.

-We ALWAYS use tracking numbers, no matter what, even on uninsured shipments. There would be no way to correlate orders to shipments if we did not, and I'm not even sure there's a low-grade enough USPS service that even comes sans tracking number.

-USPS insurance itself is off the table for our shipments: if you read the insurance documentation provided by USPS in-depth you can see that the maximum coverage they'll provide for bullion on non-registered-mail shipments is $15.

-Registered Mail is off the table for high-volume shipments: it's a service rarely utilised by average consumers, and when it comes down to how we are able to integrate with carriers to produce prepaid shipments Registered Mail is for all intensive purposes unavailable. In terms of value, once a shipment reaches the point where Registered Mail would be engaged(more than $500 for an international shipment), security protocols and insurance companies get upgraded quite heavily as does the carrier. USPS, even with registered mail, is only suitable for low-weight low-value shipments.

-We always buffer the value of a shipment's insurance by a wide margin, at great cost to us, to ensure that even during heavy market volatility the insured value can remain valid.

-We cover random expenses that come up for orders on a regular basis, whether it's upgrading the security protocols / insurance for $100 out-of-pocket to ensure a volatility buffer+coverage, paying insane government fees for bizarre demands($400 to Thailand recently, for example), sending PCGS instead of standard uncirculated coins when the market dries up, eating the cost of insuring large orders beyond what we actually charged($1100 for one single order recently), et cetera. We spend a TON of money making sure customers are well taken care of, and would have done so for Kris had he actually communicated with us and taken me up on my offer to replace.

-Unfortunately, as a rule we encounter a LOT of fraud. I'm not quite sure how we compare to more traditional fiat-based dealers, but without writing an instruction manual for potential scammers I can tell you that there are a variety of ways that people routinely attempt to defraud us for quite large sums of money.

-We don't hoard your coins for weeks or months at a time. This would in essence equate to gambling with customers' funds instead of engaging in our conversion process. We maintain metal reserves, and continually replace our reserves to account for products ordered.

-As I said before, out of thousands of shipments this has been our only failed claim to date. Our loss rates, claim-success-rates aside, are around 0.25%, which is exceedingly low. That's why I offered Kris some replacement metal happily in November.



I'm not quite sure what the uproar is about: Nearly 5 months ago I tried to open the door with him as far as my willingness to cover some, if not all, of the cost of his failed insurance claim. Instead of taking me up on it, he just sent non-substantive IRC messages continually and posted on the forums complaining about 80btc. I'm re-extending that offer to him again, despite his less-than-truthful portrayal of events. As my long-term customers and peers will tell you, I tend to be a very reasonable person if you take the time to talk to me and will always bend over backwards to enrich Bitcoin in any way possible.

-Jay