Receipts shown by Konman – but something still seems wrong

Duncan Oldham, owner of Koptalk, finally produced some “receipts” tonight from the Alder Hey collection. ‘At last!’ I thought, what a great way to end the year. Finally a positive post about Koptalk.

Except that’s not quite how it worked out.

I’ll not go through all the problems, but seeing as the only way to get Dunk to respond to anything is to put it here (he ignores all the emails I send as “Insider”) I’ll put my initial concerns here for him to address. Or knowing him, for him to attempt to brush under the carpet.

First of all, the receipt for “Gameplay”.

There are four items, but only three prices. 22.99, 34.99 and 39.99. I add this up as £97.97. The receipt shows a total of 112.96. So the item without a price must come to £14.99. Why’s it not showing as that on the receipt though? Has Dunk been using Photoshop to do more than just hide the address etc?

Also this receipt does not show how the payment was made – card/cash/vouchers. We need that information Dunk if you are to get off the hook over this.

I’ve noticed a potential issue with artifacts from the image, it could be caused by you having tried to change something on there, it could be innocent. Please supply a higher resolution version of the image for us to use to look properly at whether or not you doctored parts of the image you shouldn’t have. It will make it easier for us to see if the actual missing price was missing or if it was removed by you using Photoshop.

The second of the two pages shows three items which add up to £54.97. The total on the page shows £152.94. Adding the £97.97 from the first page to the £54.97 on the second page gives us the figure of £152.94. But we’ve noticed that the sub-total on the first page says £112.96. It all seems a bit odd – perhaps you should provide a higher resolution version of this receipt too.

Additionally you should get a screenshot of the order page from the Gameplay website – if you don’t know how to get screenshots let us know – it’s really easy. Lots of your members have done it to show us various goings on from Koptalk in the last few months.

The Amazon receipts has you in a bit of bother too Duncan. Remember what we said about gift vouchers?

Now £12.99 isn’t a massive amount, but it’s still an amount. You shouldn’t have been using the gift vouchers you already had to pay for goods.

There were five items on this receipt (or four items, with a quantity of 2 on one of the items if you prefer). Prices were 234.03, 28.08, (2 x 11.06) = 22.12 and 32.33. That’s pre-VAT. I total that up as £316.56.

Amazon don’t total it up yet the way their receipts work. They add postage, in this case £7.65 and take off Gift Certificates, in this case £12.99. I work that out at £311.22.

Amazon don’t though. The work it out as £324.21 for some strange reason. A difference of £12.99. That’s probably the gift certificate – unneccessary confusion because Dunk wasn’t supposed to be using any.

VAT isn’t added yet, and Amazon calculate that at £54.81. There’s no VAT on the postage, so it should be 17.5% of 316.56. I’d appreciate anyone reading this to check this for me – because Amazon seem to have charged VAT on £313.20. I know we’re only talking a couple of quid, but sometimes it’s descrepancies of a couple of quid that prove some kind of fraud has gone on elsewhere. Anyone who’s familiar with how all this really should be worked out please check my calculations! (I’m rushing things a little here prior to going out for NYE!)

The final total shows £367.96, which if you knock off the VAT of £54.81 comes to 313.15. I’m probably doing something wrong in my calculations here, but is it possible Dunk’s doctored this receipt too? Has he tried to change the figures showing a much higher amount taken as gift vouchers and got his sums wrong? Have I got my sums wrong? Have Amazon got theirs wrong? HELP!

This receipt shows the rest of the money was paid by Switch, so assuming we can work out why those other figures don’t seem to add up then the only problem would be the use of that £12.99 gift voucher. There is a possible good explanation for this, but without access to the now deleted original Alder Hey threads it’s impossible to check if this potential good explanation was mentioned. Dunk – explain the gift voucher.

Another point I’ve noticed is that the Euro amounts are supposed to have been converted at 1.48 Euros to the Pound Sterling. The individual items seem to convert OK, but by the time it’s totalled up it’s out by a bit more. This could be a rounding issue – but it could be that the figures on the total line have been doctored. Any visiting experts could do me a big favour by checking this!

As for the Argos receipts – well I’m sorry Dunk but you need to do better than this. You went to Argos twice. You have two receipts. You have split the receipts up into 14 small images and have hidden far too much of the detail – it seems once again you’ve got something to hide. You’ve obviously managed to scan the receipts in full, possibly as two separate images per receipt if the receipts are longer than a piece of A4 paper. At the most there should be 4 images, not 14!

Get the four images, and then do what you did with the Gameplay and Amazon receipts. Blank out anything that is personally identifiable to you. I doubt very much that you’ve got anything more to hide than the actual card number, and it’s not always the case that the full card number is recorded on receipts these days. There should be some lines saying something like…

Amount Due: XXX.XX.
Switch: XXX.XX
Vouchers: XXX.XX
Total Paid: XXX.XX

That’s why I think you’ve hidden this – you’ve paid by voucher instead of cash. You had, off the top of my head, about £170 in vouchers sent to you, and there should be nothing more than that showing on the receipt. Let’s see the receipts in full please, with just personal information blanked out.

This statement from you is bullshit isn’t it? “The main receipts for the goods we purchased this year were far too long to fit into the scanner so we’ve broken them down and enlarged where possible to make them clearer for you.” You had to scan the whole receipts in before you could edit them in Photoshop! People aren’t as thick as you are Duncan, so don’t expect them to fall for things that only very thick people would fall for.

Why should anyone need to bother Alder Hey? Your other statement about the missing payment details: “We have removed the card payment details but Irene has this information on the actual receipts” is not good enough. We want to see the receipts ourselves without having to bother Irene.

We also need a total of how much was collected. Reinstate the thread showing who pledged what. Let’s add the final totals up ourselves. How can you tell us you went “over budget” if you can’t prove how much was collected. What happened to Marcel’s £26.00 too?

And in all three cases – Amazon, Argos and Gamplay – we’ve got to work out how much commission you got. I doubt you got any for Argos (unless you used the reservation service first) but you certainly got up to 5% from Amazon.

So, to summarise…

1) Gameplay receipts. Clarify why there is a missing price for one of the items and why the totals are out from one page to the next. Show proof (screenshot?) of payment being made by card, not by gift voucher. Re-scan the receipts at a higher resolution, they are quite difficult to read and there does seem to be something wrong with that missing figure.

2) Amazon receipt. We need to clarify why the totals seem wrong. Why not show us a screenshot from Amazon too, will take you a couple of minutes to do. You need to explain this gift voucher too. Otherwise you’ve done quite well on this one.

3) Argos receipts. You had two receipts. At most these would have needed four separate images for you to be able to fit them on the scanner. You had to do this in order to be able to manipulate them in photoshop! Publish the full receipts, hiding only any actual card numbers. We need to see you didn’t use vouchers for this purchase. We need to see what the total order came to as well, just in case you got some kind of discount. Stop hiding things Duncan. It makes you look shiftier than ever.

4) Potential lies. Don’t say you can’t re-scan the receipts – you’ve not posted them yet. You were still scanning them in just before lunch today, and so you can still scan them again.

5) Do this tonight – you told your readers earlier that you would be sat monitoring Kop Talk all night tonight, so it’s not like you’ve got a night out with the missus planned or anything.

6) Totals – reinstate all of those deleted threads – we need to see that the amounts you claim to have collected match what was spent. Did you really put some of your own money towards the appeal? Did that £10 voucher you said you’d ordered from Argos ever arrive?

7) Lauren – start getting some proof together about where her money went. We’re talking about thousands of pounds of missing money in that case aren’t we?

And anyone reading this – please check these figures for me!

It’s a pity that an apology, if indeed I do need to make one, will now have to wait until the New Year.

Happy New Year everyone!