Today’s IsraelSims.com update

Here’s today’s update on the suffering inflicted upon my family by IsraelSims.com:

As I noted in a comment on yesterday’s posting, the author of Frommer’s Israel has informed me that he has heard stories about IsraelSims similar to mine from a number of people, and he is planning on removing the reference to IsraelSims from the next edition of the book. IsraelSims is going to lose a lot of customers over that!

My wife arrived in Tel Aviv today and went to the Cellcom store to buy a SIM card. When she told them she had ordered one by mail and it hadn’t arrived in time, the clerk told her she was the second person today from Boston to whom that had happened. This prompts the following thought…

I’m not sure there’s any point in trying to guess what the heck happened with IsraelSims, but my current theory is that they didn’t have enough stock to satisfy all their orders immediately, so they delayed shipping orders to nearby towns, assuming they’d take less time to deliver. Then they either continued to be low on stock and thus continued to delay nearby orders, or they simply forgot to go back and send them.

Neither our original order supposedly shipped on July 20 nor the replacement order supposedly shipped on July 27 arrived in today’s mail.

Yesterday I sent IsraelSims an angry email with a link to my blog posting and told them I’d be going out of my way in the future to take every opportunity to warn people about them in person and on the Internet. They actually responded to this email, as opposed to the previous two which they ignored. Here’s their entire response:

Do you know the really sad part…….we felt so bad about what happened that we refunded you fully yesterday without waiting for you to send back the 4 SIM cards we sent you.

No apology for ignoring two email messages and a voicemail message. No apology for promising on two separate occasions that they would call me back and then not doing so. No apology for saying they were going to send a replacement via FedEx and then (supposedly) sending it via the postal service instead. No attempt to explain why a package supposedly shipped on July 20 did not show up at a postal service facility until July 27. No attempt to explain why they were unable to provide a correct  tracking number for the replacement package they supposedly sent.

These guys really need to get some help.

(It remains to be seen whether they’re telling the truth about refunding my money yesterday. If they really did, then it’ll take another day or two for it to show up on the credit card’s Web site. I suppose it’s possible that they’re telling the truth about this, but given that they’ve lied about so much else, I’m not holding my breath.)