It’s been a year since The Plastic Merchant crashed and burned. Many people lost thousands of dollars in gift cards that they sold to The Plastic Merchant but never got paid for. I was doing site clean-up the other day and came across a post about The Plastic Merchant. Out of curiosity, I decided to visit their website. I figured it would be down, but was genuinely shocked to see the following message:
First off, what fresh hell is this? You don’t run off with tens (possibly hundreds) or thousands of dollars of other people’s money and then compare yourself to a mythical bird symbolizing all that is good and admirable. When you’ve lied and screwed people out of their hard-earned money, you don’t get to hype up your come-back story.
You also don’t offer up a lame apology by way of “Sorry for the struggle.” It’s not a struggle, it’s fraud and you subjected your customers to it. More importantly, you don’t use this as an opportunity to promote (and profit off) your Amazon affiliate links. This is not just tasteless, it’s completely delusional and mind-boggling to me.
I met Michael at the Chicago Seminars a few years ago and he seemed like a nice enough guy. He insisted in emails that some of the “troll” comments about TPM’s payment issues were from a group of haters who had created a Slack group just to bad-mouth him. It was all lies and TPM’s payment issues were always rectified. An army of trolls could not have painted a more delusional picture of TPM than those four lines of text on their homepage did.
What TPM can do to make amends
At this point, if this “we’ll be back soon” message isn’t a poorly executed joke and The Plastic Merchant is serious about going back into business, they need to first and foremost repay the people they owe money to. Easy. TPM bought people’s gift cards, unloaded them elsewhere, and never paid for them. Pay people back, period.
Step 2: Get into a different line of work. You don’t get to keep peddling large sums of people’s cash when you’ve been so reckless and downright incompetent about it in the past. There is simply no reality in which The Plastic Merchant will win back the trust of former customers.
Nor will they get new customers, because the first thing anyone will see when they Google “The Plastic Merchant” is a results page riddled with negative stories about their past. The company can change its name. Bloggers and Reddit users will continue to churn out content exposing their past misdeeds.
Regardless of whether there’s a future for The Plastic Merchant or not, they need to do the right thing and pay people back. Then take an accounting class. And an ethics course. Because the way this company has conducted itself was dishonest and shameful to the core. They may have avoided criminal prosecution, but this comeback story is not one people are rooting for.
Fuck Michael and the TPM
This message has been up on the site for several months
I used to sell to TPM, then I got busy with life and work so stopped for awhile. They dropped me because of inactivity.
I saw TPM at CardCon in Orlando in September 2018. He said to resubmit and I would be approved right away. I applied but there was no response.
I am SO glad that my account never got reactivated, otherwise I would have been one of the unfortunate people who lost money as they crashed and burned.
I hope that they do what’s right and take care of the people who are owed money.
Same here. I hope regardless of what happens to the company, they’ll right their wrongs.
I think someone just bought the domain name to try to make some money off affiliated link. There is NO way anyone would trust this guy again after his blatant theft.
I hope that’s true.
Good stuff…any updates on Gift Card Mall hacks..Always nice to know who to use?
GCM never acknowledged it. But I’ve been getting reports from readers who have used their cards in the last week and haven’t experienced any fraud issues. Yet.
I still sell to Mike in a private group, I sell most stuff to him at loss but I make it up in volume. Good luck finding anyone buying higher than the 85% I get from selling him Best Buy!
There are other platforms out there that pay MUCH higher than 85% for Best Buy! Can’t imagine how you could make any profits consistently selling Best Buy at 85%.
If you sell MOST at a loss, how do you make it up in volume? That makes as much sense as TPM’s bank balance at the end.
If you mean that you are happy profiting from the card benefits and losing on the GC purchase/sale price itself, that isn’t the same as “volume.”
I think he’s joking. No way anyone would sell to Mike after the con he pulled.
I hope this is a joke.
@Graz, I will pay 86% if you are selling in high volume. This rate will leave me a thin margin but Might be worth it if we’re talking about tens of thousands, or at least thousands.
Mike’s personal site: http://michaelcdean.com
Leave my brah Mike alone. Delta Chi fo evah
If you got stiffed by Mike at TPM, you can file a claim in the bankruptcy case here: https://www.moeb.uscourts.gov/epoc-electronic-proof-claim-filing
The case number is 19-46230
Thank you for sharing!