Bought 40 aged accounts, 34 dead inside a week — has anyone ever actually been refunded?

Ran the diff. PipelineRat was right and I feel a bit sick.

All 34 dead accounts have a recovery phone on the same country code. All six survivors have no recovery method at all. I never looked at this because the seller's listing said no recovery attached, and I believed the listing instead of checking the accounts.

So they were linked before I touched them. Doesn't get my money back but at least I know what happened.

Now name him. You have the evidence and the listing was false. That's a different conversation.

listing said one thing, accounts said another. that's not attrition, that's misdescription

Congratulations, you bought forty accounts and one phone number.

Sent him the diff. He's offered 30% credit against a future order, no cash, and says the recovery numbers were added by the platform not by him, which I don't believe but can't disprove.

Taking it, because 30% of something beats 100% of an argument I can't win. Not buying from him again.

30% credit is better than everyone in this thread predicted to be fair!!

Credit against a future order is not a refund. It's a discount on your next loss with the same vendor.

Late to this but the thread has arrived somewhere useful and I want to write down the general rule, because this exact shape recurs about twice a year here.

Why account refunds don't exist

The seller cannot distinguish a batch that was bad on delivery from a batch the buyer burned, and neither can the buyer, and both of them know it. In that situation the terms will always say no refund after use, and no amount of arguing changes an incentive. This is not the seller being unusually dishonest. It's the equilibrium.

What changes the conversation

Misdescription. Not "they died", which is unfalsifiable, but "the listing said X and the artifact says not-X", which is checkable by a third party. Marta_K got a partial credit the moment she moved from the first claim to the second. Everyone who gets anything back gets it this way.

So the practical version:

1. Before warming anything, record the checkable properties of every account in the batch — recovery methods present, creation region, anything the listing made a claim about. Ten minutes, once.
2. If a batch dies, diff survivors against casualties before you open a ticket. Go in with the difference, not the death count.
3. Buy in batches small enough that the loss is annoying rather than structural, as paulofrz said forty posts too early for anyone to listen.

The part nobody wants

If a vendor's accounts arrive pre-linked, the fault is upstream of both of you — he bought them in a block too. Which means the good vendors aren't the ones with better terms, they're the ones with better suppliers, and you cannot tell those apart from a sales thread. You can only tell from batches, over time, at your own expense.

Summary: refunds happen for misdescription, never for death, and the ten minutes of recording before you start is the only leverage you will ever have.

This should be pinned and it won't be.

bought 15 from someone else, 11 dead, checked the recovery thing first this time. all same code

Necroing because it just happened to me and this thread is the reason I checked before warming rather than after.

20 accounts, ran the diff on arrival, 14 of them shared a recovery domain. Went straight back to the seller before touching a single one and got a full replacement on those 14 without an argument - because the credentials were unused, which is the whole difference.

Check on delivery, not on death. That's the thread in one line.

Four months later and this is still the best outcome anyone in the thread has had. Well done.

Merged the two follow-up threads on this into here. Everything worth reading is above.