We have received a complaint from a user about QualityVapeCarts.com, reporting that they take your money and don’t deliver. This is a sadly common problem in the THC vape cartridge market, particularly in black market in states where cannabis isn’t legalized for recreational use yet.

A Frustrating Exchange With QualityVapeCarts.com

The customer captured screenshots of the whole transaction.

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The customer service rep (?) named “Andrew Golden,” says that QualityVapeCarts insists on being paid as a “Friends and Family” party on PayPal to dodge PayPal’s normal purchase protection.

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Since PayPal glitches out, they try Venmo next. From Venmo’s own help page, “Venmo does not offer a buyer or seller protection program for transactions conducted using the Venmo app or Venmo.com, regardless of the nature of the payment (or charge), unless expressly offered to you by Venmo.”

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The QualityVapeCarts assistant assures the customer they will get a tracking number, but here comes the twist on that:

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The package tracking is conducted on QuickMoveLogistics.com, which the user notices is a website created only a few weeks ago.

ProTip: Use “Whois” to help verify websites

Whois” (Who is… ?) is a Unix-level terminal command and query protocol as old as the World Wide Web itself. It’s like checking the license and registration on a website. There are a number of whois server websites on the web, so you can use them from any web browser or phone.

WhoIs.net is one such service. Simply type in the website domain, and get a dump of its registration information. Here’s a handy tutorial video on WhoIs, which also shows the same concept for individual domain webhosts:

Here’s the information whois reports on QuickMoveLogistics.com:

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The Creation Date tells you when the site was first registered. This shows a date of 2020-03-14, March 14th, 2020, only a couple weeks before this transaction.

As for this case, the user was able to ascertain the domain wasn’t legit by Googling it and noting the shortage of results, which is also an ad-hoc substitute for a whois checkup.

Back to our story…

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With proverbial “insult to injury,” the service rep at QualityVapeCarts.com responds with abuse to the customer upon their reporting that the alleged package tracking site doesn’t appear legit.

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Our thanks to this user (we’re leaving them anonymous) for alerting us all to this scammer. May his experience make us all wiser!

Count the red flags in online THC cart sellers like QualityVapeCarts:

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  • Wants to dodge purchase protection
  • Uses an unorthodox package tracking service
  • Stalls too long to minimize chance of a refund
  • Unprofessional conduct
  • Prices on products are unrealistically low
  • Sells commonly fake or counterfeit brands – see our list of most frequent fakes

As we mention, these kinds of scam sites are all too common. A while ago, we posted about a similar scam site taking money and not delivering.

There’s more where that came from. Only six days ago as of this writing, a Redditor reports a scam cart merchant on SnapChat. Online sellers of vapes are notorious enough for scams that the DEA and FDA has taken action against some back in December 2019. As early as November of 2018, scammers ripping people off on Instagram have been a thing.

Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a “legit” black market retailer

The whole point of legalizing and regulating cannabis was to have a secure and trustworthy market. We don’t know what happened to that goal, it got lost along the way somehow. But for people who are stuck getting their cannabis products through unofficial channels, we can’t really offer a recommended way to do that where the consumer is protected.

Our ever-vigilant readers are welcome to tip us off to their experiences with online retailers in the comments below or in our forum.

UPDATE – Reading all these comments about everybody getting ripped off, like:

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With people losing $250 to $650, these scammers must be raking it in!

Here is the FBI’s Online Crime Complaint Center: https://www.ic3.gov/ – This has to stop, if it can be stopped.

14 COMMENTS

  1. I was screwed also bye qualitythcportal,before reading this..the piece of shit stole my money was name Denzel hakins…
    QUALITYTHCPORTAL are
    Thief’s

  2. I believe QualityVapeCarts is a scam. I ordered from them on the 30th picked PayPal to pay with but never seen them put it through. But they never asked for me to pay with friends or family either, I just got an email with the receipt of the order saying the order# and a reminder of what I ordered, and that the order is on hold until they can firm payment has been received. Today is the 3rd and haven’t heard anything from them and they never answered any emails I sent them. There is nothing suspicious on PayPal or anything from them as of yet, so guess I can’t do anything unless they try to charge me!!!!!!

  3. I was also scammed by
    Qualityvapecarts.com
    I used PayPal but because it was sent to friends and family they will not refund my money. If it were sent to a business I could possibly get it back. Live and learn. Stay away from this site. Andrew Golden is a fucking douche bag!! Fucking thief!

  4. If you’ve been scammed by their service, and it was through Paypal (or venmo), you still might be able to get back your money as I did; just be aware that it is time sensitive, and again there is no guarantee, but it’s definitely worth a shot.
    If you paid through venmo, contact them via: https://help.venmo.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
    and explain to them that you’ve been scammed for a service you never received. If the money is still in the scammer’s Venmo account, they might be able to get it back to you (it will likely stay in their account, as their accounts are all new as they cycle through a bunch of them scamming people, and they can’t transfer the funds for about a week without triggering red flags on Venmo’s end). I believe that is why the scammer went through the extra effort of creating the fake shipping site with tracking numbers and the like to keep your hopes up long enough to be able to get away with your money.

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