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Comment by ddalex | Hacker News Reader

I guess with a high profile link from HN to Medium indexed by Google, and future owner will see the red flags from a mile away... KitSplit is as good as dead right now.

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Unfortunately unlikely. This exact scenario has happened before, except on a prominent photography publication instead of Medium: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18332918

It's going to keep happening until someone takes them to court.

I hate to say it but unless you're bound by an arbitration agreement in the terms of service you should just file in small claims. Even still...file in small claims and make them fight to have the case sent to arbitration. Lawyers are expensive and you won't need one in small claims.

Sometimes the process is the punishment.

Arbitration clauses are pretty good for consumers for small injustices. KitSplit can't litigate an arbitration for even $35,000 dollars, let alone $3,500.

> We also provided Peter reimbursement for the camera, and are seeking additional reimbursement via collections.

So it died at that point because they reimbursed the owner.

This is their only way out at this point. But they took the high ground this time, and it's likely that the bad press will grow until they will compensate the unlucky chap to make this disappear as well.

I would not be so sure. This is not the first KitSplit story posted to HN. The last one was less than a year ago and was for an even more expensive camera.

Also, the co-founder of KitSplit has an account here as well.

The third google link is to an article on PetaPixel [0] with just as much detail as this and a very similar headline "How I Lent My $4,500 Camera Kit for $95 and Had It Stolen", from October 2018. The author here clearly didn't google anything about KitSplit, or if they did weren't convinced by the existing documentation of bad behaviour. I'm not sure why this new article would be any different.

They reimbursed the first owner - that's the difference.

According to the article they reimbursed the owner $2000, two months after $4500 worth of equipment was stolen. Still not confidence inspiring.

HN is not nearly as high-profile as we'd like to think.

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