[Failure] lost £340 to a group buy. posting so somebody else does not.
2024. Eleven of us, one organiser, no escrow. Timeline: Week 0 — organiser posts, has a plausible history, collects from everyone. Week 2 — "supplier delay", detailed and believable. Week 4 — "shipment split, first half moving". Two people receive something. This is the part that kept everyone calm. Week 6 — slower…
The partial-delivery detail is the important one and I have not seen it written up this clearly before.
Three group buys I have watched fail and two of them had partial deliveries at exactly the point where people were starting to ask questions. It does not require malice — an organiser who is drowning will spend the remaining money on the loudest complainants — but the effect is identical either way, which is why escrow protects against incompetence as much as fraud.
"an organiser who is drowning will spend the remaining money on the loudest complainants" is the most useful sentence anyone has said to me about this in two years.
this is number five on the pattern list and i am adding the partial-delivery mechanism to the entry, credited to this thread.
and it is why my ledger only counts verified outcomes. "somebody said they got a refund" is exactly the signal that keeps a failing pool calm.
and in two of the cases i have seen, some of the reassuring voices were the organiser. same typo, same hour.
i have gone back and reread our thread with that in mind and i do not love what i found.