An Aussie small business owner claims to have caught a customer in an embarrassing lie, after she saw her post a photo on Instagram in a top she’d claimed was “missing” from her online order.
Reakt Apparel founder Kayla Thomas took to TikTok to share a “juicy story time” about her encounter with a customer she claims was not being honest.
The saga started with an order of three sports crop tops from the Reakt Apparel Instagram page.
When Ms Thomas received the order she could see it was from a local.
“I thought it’s local, she goes to my old gym and she has mutuals [followers] with me, it will be fine,” Ms Thomas said in the TikTok video.
“So I decided I’m gonna drop it off to her so she gets it the same day.”
Ms Thomas said she packed the order herself and delivered it to the customer around 10.30am, but at 9pm that night, the customer emailed Reakt Apparel to say she “had one crop missing”.
“And I’m thinking, how was that possible? Like, did I make a mistake? I was literally second guessing myself,” Ms Thomas said in the video.
She replied to the customer promising she would investigate what happened.
“At this point I’m still really confused and second-guessing myself, but from a business perspective I’m like who would lie about this? And maybe I did make a mistake,” Ms Thomas said.
“So I thought you know what for the sake of a crop [top], I’ll send her another one.”
But she claims the customer then made an odd request.
In screenshots of their emails, Ms Thomas shows her offer to replace the top is met with the customer’s request for Reakt to “arrange [a] white twist crop instead [of] black” like she initially ordered.
“This is where I thought, no, this is really weird. It’s odd,” the businesswoman said in the video.
Ms Thomas then asked a mutual friend about the customer. The friend confirmed that they went to the same gym and the customer often posted workout selfies to Instagram which were re-shared by the gym’s account.
So Mr Thomas went digging, and claims she “couldn’t believe” what she found.
“There she was … the same day wearing the black crop that was apparently missing,” she said.
“And the weird part is she literally tagged me in the post but I didn’t see it because her account is private and we don’t follow each other. So I sent her a follow request and she accepted straight away.”
In a follow-up TikTok, Ms Thomas said she confronted the customer.
She sent an email – which she claims got “no response” – and hours after following the customer’s Instagram account, she could still see the gym selfies that she posted wearing the “missing” top.
“I thought surely she deletes the story. No. So I ‘liked’ her story and left it for about half an hour … [but the] story’s still up,” Ms Thomas said.
Ms Thomas then sent the customer a message explaining the difficulties of running a small business.
She claims the customer eventually replied apologising “that [Ms Thomas] felt that” and said she had emailed Reakt saying she had found the missing top after all.
Thousands of people commented on the videos, which have gone viral on social media.