Buying an engagement ring is a huge deal.
For starters, engagement rings are super expensive. Then you have the pressure of making sure your partner actually likes it, and checking that you’re covered if you need to return it within so many weeks.
What you wouldn’t expect to have to deal with, though, is not receiving the ring in the first place.
But that’s exactly what happened to one man in Houston, when he paid upfront for an engagement ring that never actually took home with him.
John Holden thought he’d got a deal that was almost too good to be true when he found a beautiful ring at ALKU Modern Jewelers at La Centerra in Katy a few months back.
There was one catch, though: while he’d paid up-front, John wouldn’t immediately have access to the ring.
Speaking to KHOU 11, John said:
“(I) was assured by the store director that I’d have the ring in two weeks if I paid cash upfront.”
This was slightly annoying, but not concerning to John at the time. He could wait two weeks for the ring – so he wrote a check.
In the meantime, John started to plan his proposal. As the two weeks drew to an end, his nerves began to kick in.
But he needn’t have bothered. The jewelry store didn’t get in touch with John to tell him that the ring was ready.
As John recalled:
“Didn’t hear anything after two weeks. Didn’t hear anything after two and a half weeks.”
By this time, John realized that something was wrong. His calls and his texts were being ignored by the store, and he still didn’t have his ring.
So he did the only thing left: he visited the store in person.
And that’s when he discovered the very thing he’d been dreading.
The store was locked and dark inside. John noticed signs posted on the windows, one telling customers to call the store’s owner.
Another note from the landlord revealed all: the tenant had failed to pay rent, so the building was locked.
We all land ourselves in financial difficulty from time to time. But the jewelry store never should have taken John’s cash while knowing that the business probably couldn’t afford to give him a refund – or the ring. That’s what makes this dodgy.
Unfortunately, it looked as if John had come across a bad bunch.
He recalled:
“After that, they kind of ghosted me. Quit answering texts. It was one thing after another.”
The lawyer of Santiago Mora, whose name is on the sign, simply said that Santiago had been “wrongfully locked out of his business and has every intention of fulfilling his obligations to his customers.”
He didn’t have anything to say about whether customers would receive the property they’d paid for – or, at the very least, be refunded.
Going forward, John’s advice to others is simple.
He urged people to be suspicious of any situation where someone is offering “an extremely big discount for a cash price”.
After posting his experience to Nextdoor, John quickly realized that he wasn’t alone. The business’s Google reviews are also very telling.
Find out whether John was able to resolve the situation – and whether he actually managed to propose to his girlfriend – in the video below.
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