Hello r/mk

Almost four months ago, I posted an announcement by capsunlocked declaring their insolvency with multiple Groupbuys unfulfilled. At that point, they had been in business for 5 years and ran half-a-dozen or so Groupbuys. While this is in inherent risk of partcipating in GBs and somewhat understandable given the Covid-19 and Brexit situation, the incredible lack of communication is not.

Since the announcement, there has not been a single message from the owner, and sole employee of Capsunlocked. The website is also no longer up, you can find the archived insolvency announcement here. While it is also understandable that they may not be in a position to disclose anything due to legal reasons. However, despite the claim that insolvency practicioners have been assigned, no required notice was published to the Gazette, nor has the company updated its filings, with accounts overdue. A commenter also said a friend searched court proceedings without any result. I also confirmed with Companies House (the UK company registry) that they indeed do not have an insolvency filing.

Now, a discord mod has replied to a request from another commenter, stating that the owner is still waiting on instructions on how to proceed. However I, and most people I talked to, think that this is not a valid explanation as to why we have to go trough a mod to even get this tiny bit of information. Nor does this seem to be a reason why you haven't even told the government that they are in fact insolvent.

And to give a rough ballpark of how much money is owed. Each keyboard is around £100. CapsUnlocked released a spreadsheet of orders that had not had their labels printed. This spreadsheet is, however, incomplete. There were many people complaining in their discord that their order wasn't on the list, including me. And obviously not every order that had its label printed was shipped. Given the fact that that spreadsheet was made pretty close to them ceasing operations, and the dark figure, I'd say that it's a pretty reasonable number for napkin maths. So the list has around 430 orders, meaning at least £43'000 of unfulfilled orders. In addition, Candykeys also has a "big order" they paid for.

What can you do if you are affected?

Drop a comment here, I'm considering making a discord server to just assess the amount of people affected and to just share anything we might know. I also got r/capsunlocked

You can complain to the UK insolvency service, someone's complaint was already rejected on the grounds that there isn't enough information to investigate a live company. But since that company should be insolvent that may get you a different response. They might consider it more if they get more complaints as well.

The same applies for companies house. You can email them at [email protected] or use the inquiries form.

Since they haven't filed their revenue, they haven't paid taxes either, so contacting the appropriate agency might yield some result as well.

If you are an UK national, here are a few more links you can look at. And I'm sure that all international customers that are affected would be very thankful for that.

Citizen's Advice has advice for consumers, including how to make a claim to the company, if you paid with a credit card or paypal. Since both the paypal dispute period and chargeback deadlines have long passed, this is something to consider.

Lastly, you can also claim damages through the online service moneyclaims.

Thanks for reading, and I hope that we can get a satisfactory conclusion to this.

Edit: There were some updates in the filings, there was a notice for a strike off from the registry due to overdue statements, but that got suspended because someone filed a complaint. But apart from that, no idea.