Buyer Beware.

I've always said I'd rather have one nice pair of shoes that I love and wear constantly than ten cheap pair that hurt my feet and fall apart.  That, and I have champagne taste on a beer budget.  So, I love online private sale sites like RueLala and One Kings Lane, not to mention local deal mongers like Groupon and Living Social.  I have a radar for outlet malls and once even got a fabulous pair of $125 JCrew jeans for $15!  {That was in college.  And they still fit. }

All that to say... finding great things and not paying full price for them is like a sport for me.  { Athleticism is not a gift I possess. }  So when my mom found toryburch-outlet.com, I was pretty pumped.  JCrew just recently opened an online outlet, so Tory Burch having one didn't seem too out of the ordinary.  I Googled "Tory Burch" and, at the time, it was the top non-sponsored result.  The prices were good { $99 for what would normally be $200 shoes }, but not so outlandishly low that I was alarmed.

Take a look for yourself.  See anything sketchy?  Nope?  Neither did I.  It even links back to toryburch.com and has hi-res zoom options where you can view the merchandise in detail.

But the moment I placed my order I knew something was up.  It dawned on me that while I'm usually a size 9.5, none of the shoes I wanted had half sizes available.  A little further digging on the site and I discovered that none of their shoes come in half sizes.  Hmm.

Then my confirmation email arrived, and it wasn't branded with Tory Burch.  And the "Contact Us" email?  A Gmail account.  Ouch.  So I did a little more Googling.  "Tory Burch Outlet Counterfeit." "Tory Burch Outlet Fake."  Nothing anywhere gave any indication that the website I had ordered from wasn't legit.  I even looked on toryburch.com for warnings about counterfeit merchandise and came up empty handed.

But somewhere in my gut I knew something wasn't right. { I spent half the night pacing the living room like wild woman I was so ticked.  Spencer had to convince me that we couldn't do anything about it at midnight and that maybe I should come upstairs and go to bed. }

The next day I checked our credit card statement online to see if it had gone through yet.  Sure enough it had, but so had an $8.95 International Transaction Fee.  INTERNATIONAL TRANSACTION FEE?!?  { Mad pacing resumes. }

{ They may look real... but they aren't. }

Well, that was three weeks ago.  And today, this gray taped up package arrived.  With a shipping label IN CHINESE.  Now, I bought real Tory Burch Reva flats as my "last big purchase before we get married and I know my husband isn't going to appreciate my love for $200 shoes", so one look at the hot pink and bright yellow shoebox before me said it all.  They may be good fakes, but they're still fake.

These shoes smell like they've been dipped in a caustic combination of paint thinner and permanent markers.  The boxes are poorly printed, the tissue has pink T medallions { instead of white on white like the real deal }, and what is marked as a size 9 is probably more like a 7.  Closer inspection reveals that the size markings on the inside of the shoe are in the wrong place and that the T medallion on the toe is a hair too small.  Not to mention the fact that the metal probably contains lead or something else equally as scary.  The smell is so bad I won't even bring them into my house.  I left them in the garage.

Needless to say, yours truly is on a bit of a rampage.  This is the kind of thing you buy on Canal Street, or on eBay, but not from your living room sofa.  Tonight, I disputed the charges with our credit card company, called Tory Burch { apparently they already know but haven't put anything on their website to warn consumers }, and reported it to:

• The Internet Crime Complaint Center
• International Consumer Protection & Enforcement Network
• The Federal Trade Commission
• Google { because these people are using Gmail to commit what I'm pretty sure is a crime }

So take that, sketchy international-copyright-infringing, stinky-shoe-sending creeps!  Maybe this post will show up if someone else decides they might want to buy a pair of cute shoes and Googles "Tory Burch Outlet".  The real ones are worth it.  The fakes... not so much!