Gotta love that feeling you get after you realize you've been bamboozled..

So my friend let me try out his Shokz OpenRun Bone Conduction headphones and they were amazing, so I resolved myself to grabbing myself a pair. I then forgot the brand name and searched online for reviews, figuring I'd find his listed among the top products.

Unfortunately it turns out that there are about half a dozen fake review sites out there listing only one brand with a 5-star rating: Inductivv Bone Induction headphones. And the best part about them is that they are only $60 USD instead of the $130-180 price for the Shokz brand! But hurry up, the discounted price is only available if you order today!

Anyways, like an idiot I don't bother to do any due diligence to check out the site and submit my order, and a week later I open the package and instead find these: OPENEAR Two-ear sports Bluetooth headset. These are NOT bone conduction headphones and instead just have tiny speakers that play sound towards your ears. And they retail for $15, not the $60 + $9.95 shipping I paid for mine.

So I call the customer service number on my email confirmation and reach a nice gentleman in India named "Shane" who proceeds to read from a script and instead of beginning the process to send me the correct product (which, just to be clear, doesn't exist - there is no such thing as a pair of Indictivv headphones) he tries to offer to give me a 50% refund and will let me keep the headphones. I decline, since I don't want them. He counters with a 75% refund, etc. etc.

Finally I just have to provide an ultimatum: Either they give me a full refund or I go through my credit card company and initiate a charge-back and get the company flagged as a scam. He finally relents and says he'll process the full refund and tells me not to bother trying to return the product. Sigh.

It's quite the racket - multiple "product review" websites created that point to their bogus vendor site. Charge people $60 (plus shipping) for a $15 product and just hope that no one notices it's not the advertised product, or if they do, pressure them into accepting a %50 refund (still making $30 off a inferior $15 product). Utterly shameful.

Hopefully anyone else that comes across this bogus product decides to search Reddit to see if it's a scam and finds this post, avoiding the pain I went through. Stay safe out there folks!