They are popping up like mushrooms right now – the scam sites that sell various products directly from foreign, often Chinese, trading places.
If the goods are delivered at all, they are often defective and do not live up to product descriptions at all. When customers try to return, they often notice that it is not possible to contact the company.
The phenomenon has led to a wave of reports to the General Complaints Board, ARN, and several of the affected customers have used Klarna as a payment option. But Klarna has often remained cold-hearted when the victims have tried to cancel the purchase.
“We had 153 cases against Klarna in 2022. Last year, the same figure was 871. So far this year, we have 260 cases directed at Klarna,” says ARN’s chairman Marcus Ice branch to Dagens Industri about the total number of cases directed against the Swedish payment giant.
Notably, ARN received 13 cases against Qliro and even fewer directed at Trustly.
Several readers have contacted DI Digital with stories about how they have been treated by Klarna’s customer service.
“Klarna’s customer service does not exist. They answer, but you never get any real information. They don’t support the customer, they terrorize the customers for crap amounts,” says Hans Flodeer whose wife bought a sock that was supposed to “relieve neurological problems” but which turned out to be a perfectly normal ankle sock.
The selling company could not be reached and then a dispute lasting several months began with Klarna and the debt collection company that the company hired.
“Klarna wants to be seen as a legitimate bank. But I would never put my money there. Why does Klarna side with the miscreants and act as a debt collector for them? We wonder about that,” says Hans Flodeer to the newspaper.
The Swedish Consumer Agency is now considering legal action against Klarna. The authority believes that in some cases Klarna has misled customers about their rights. According to the so-called right of objection, the customer can in principle make the same demands on the creditor as the original seller.
“It is extremely serious when a large credit provider like Klarna does not observe the right of objection,” says Gabriella Fenger-Krog, head of unit at the Swedish Consumer Agency.
Klarna engages in some self-criticism and says that it should always be safe and secure to shop with Klara and that customers should receive the right information and help.
“We can only regret that we have not lived up to that standard on these occasions. The consumer’s right of objection applies and we at Klarna must try cases and make decisions without referring to ARN”, says Klarna’s press officer Joel Hedin to Dagens Industri.
He also says that Klarna carries out “regular checks” of the merchants the company works with and where the company “discovers that a merchant no longer meets the requirements of Klarna, or has many dissatisfied customers, we act immediately.”
