The Commerce Ministry has returned Tk40 lakh to 20 customers of the e-commerce platform Qcoom.
The customers did not receive products in seven months after paying in advance.
Senior Commerce Secretary Tapan Kanti Ghosh inaugurated the formal process of returning the money stuck in the payment gateway Foster’s account.
In the first phase, Tk60 crore out of Tk398 will be returned to the 6,721 customers who paid in advance but did not get their products.
In the next phase, steps will be taken regarding other customers of Qcoom who have money stuck.
Tapan Kanti Ghosh said that they decided to provide a unique ID number for each e-commerce company to get registered after a meeting with several ministries. "Hopefully, we’ll be able to start it in the next 15 days," he added.
He said: "The most important thing was that the customer neither got their money back nor received the products, they wanted the money back. I wanted the opinion of the Law Ministry about those companies against whom cases have been filed.”
In reply, the Law Ministry said all the companies against whom there are cases and the owner is in jail, their customers’ money cannot be refunded. Despite many complaints against Qcoom, there was no case against this company.
Meanwhile, Shomi Kaiser, president of the e-Commerce Association (e-CAB), said the refunding 20 customers of Qcoom through Foster Payment Gateway will help overcome the crisis centring e-commerce platforms.
"We think there are very few companies which do business dishonesty. Most of the entrepreneurs who’re running businesses during the pandemic are working with integrity, most of them small and medium entrepreneurs," she added.
Expressing gratitude to the Commerce Ministry, she said: "It’s a great initiative to refund the customers for which the ministry has been working for the last few months. This will again help the e-commerce sector to regain the trust of people."
Refunding the money to Qcoom customers is the first among other platforms after the series of scams in this sector.
Qcoom customers paid Tk166 crore with the escrow service that was launched on June 30 last year, but did not receive their products.
Besides Tk398 crore stuck with Foster, another Tk100 worth of goods are in the Qcoom warehouse, and were not delivered to the customers.
Qcoom had Tk790 crore paid by customers in its six accounts, according to the Bangladesh Bank’s Financial Intelligence Unit. However, the suspended accounts currently have only Tk2.97 crore since the company withdrew the rest of the money.
Earlier, e-commerce platform Qcoom and their payment gateway Foster Corporation jointly submitted a list of 6,621 transactions at the commerce ministry of their customers to refund Tk59.05 crore.
Sources said Tk398 crore of Qcoom was stuck at Foster Payment Gateway, of which purchase orders about half of the money has not been delivered to the customers. The commerce ministry asked them to find a way to refund customers if there were no legal complications.
