Warning About Buying From Chess Informant

Sorry to take up everyone's time with what is essentially a customer complaint, but it's a good thing to know that if you buy one of the Chess Informant downloadable products -- like the Small ECO, the ECE II-I, any of the Chess Informant magazines, etc. -- you may get nothing for your money. Their system is such that they will send you the link to the downloadable within a day or so of you buying it, along with a serial number. There's nothing weird about that. But when my serial number didn't work, that's when they did something really, really weird:

Of course I *did* try after that, many times, and there is no way to get their product to install. Thing is, they aren't saying anything now. They've gone silent. What can I do about that? Dudes are in Serbia. Am I supposed to take my case to the Serbian courts? For thirty bucks?

All I can say, that happened. I went hungry to get this software, and all I did was spend thirty dollars on a PGN file. I least I got that. But be careful with these people.

Thanks for letting us know. That reply is absolutely unacceptable. Do they even know how computers work?

They fixed it in the end, though. I had to raise holy etc, but they sent me another copy of the file, and a new serial, which went through without a hitch. The next morning they got back in touch with me and said that someone had been in charge that day who was just filling in. That's plausible. And they sent me a second product to remedy the situation, which was pretty generous of them. Their Kasparov collection. There was an awful moment where I was hoping that the serial number for the other one wouldn't give me any problems, and it didn't. But that would have been like a sit-com at that point. :-)