Candy Chaos and the great subscription box scam!

Hey there

I want to talk about the comic chaos box i mentioned in one of my previous posts. You can view it in the blog archive at the bottom right of this page.

Comic chaos were a monthly subscription box company that offered boxes filled with comics and collectables for the price of £19.99 a month. They offered other larger boxes for more money and smaller options for less. They ran for a number of months successfully and had rave reviews from their customers.

They then expanded their company and opened other subcription boxes as follows : Candy Chaos (boxes with candy from around the world), creepy chaos (boxes with horror themed collectibles), total chaos ( which was filled with leftovers from the three boxes). They then opened a new company called chick crate.

Upon opening Chick crate they said it was ran by friends as a separate company. However when you paid for your chick crate subscription via paypal it stated you were paying via comic chaos. Still they insisted that it was a seperate company. Now i offered a review of chick crate in my past blog and i explained how i was ripped off so i won't cover old ground here.

In december comic chaos began delaying orders that had been placed on their website. They continued to take new orders for boxes across their sites until late April. Regardless of the fact that no Comic Chaos Boxes had been sent out since January. Boxes for total chaos and creepy chaos also became delayed. The last total chaos box delivered was a candy chaos box.

Then Comic Chaos promised to deliver all orders at the end of May. On the day that the boxes were to be sent out. Comic chaos, total chaos and creepy chaos ceased trading. They deleted their websites and facebook accounts claiming they had gone bust. At this point they owed customers thousands of pounds.

At the same time Candy Chaos revamped their websites, they removed all references to the other chaos boxes and more importantly they removed all information relating to their company address and contact information. They claimed that they were an independent company that had no relationship to the other companies.

The reason they did this is because their address and contact details are the same that were used for the other companies. When confronted on facebook, they deleted posts and blocked anyone who mentioned it. They then updated their page with a post denying any connection to the other chaos boxes.

An investigation of their website shows they have no company number, this means they are illegally trading and pay no taxes. Upon searching the HRMC website for registered companies it shows that total chaos and candy chaos were listed as bankrupt a long time before they informed customers and well before they stopped taking money from people.

In order to retrieve my money i contacted paypal after an investigation they contacted the owner of the account i paid my comic chaos subscription to and told them they had to return my money. Yesterday the money was returned by the owner of the account .... None other than Candy Chaos.

Along with others i have reported the company under all it's guises to inland revenue and paypal both will launch fraud investigations. They have asked that i tell people that if they paid money to any of the companies for goods that were not recieved then they can claim the money back via paypal.

I thought i had well researched the companies before i purchased. I watched unboxings on youtube, read blog reviews and looked at posts on their Facebook pages to check for complaints. They seemed genuine, but that was my mistake.

 Unboxing videos are usually posted by people who have been given the box for free, they are unlikely to put across any bad points as they want to recieve more boxes from other companies. More importantly the company knows that they are going to make videos and therefore can tailor the contents to make a box look more impressive, In the case of chick crate the only online unboxing was at that time by someone who turned out to be involved with the company and the box i recieved was different in quality, quantity and value for money. As for facebook pages Candy chaos has managed to delete all negative comments almost immediately meaning it's impossible to tell that they have been involved in this at all.

If you've been a victim of a dodgy subscription box or had your money taken by comic chaos or their affiliated companies then let me know in the comments below.