Marblekg orchid vendor in Florida
 

Beware of this seller. He does not stand behind his plants. I bought a cattleya percivaliana ‘Summit ‘ and it finally bloomed. Obviously not a percivaliana. I contacted him and he refuses to do anything about it. I have been growing orchids for over 40 years and this is the most disreputable vendor I have ever dealt with. I urge you to avoid them.

On the bright side, he won't ever sell to you again after you you criticise him.

Yeah, very unfortunate and I agree, he's not someone that I would ever deal with. This forum and others have repeated warnings about this seller, but unfortunately, folks still get burned.

Ebay is opening up fraud charges against this seller. If mire people would notify eBay about being burned he would get banned from selling on eBay and it would save future customers from having to deal with him

I bough a C perci 'Summit' from him also, and it bloomed out to be a different plant entirely. I wrote a post about it here with pictures, maybe about a year ago. I bought another plant from him a year or so before that, and it was the wrong plant too. The first time I got the wrong plant from him, I didn't directly ask him to do anything to make it right, I just asked him if he might know what plant it actually was. He didn't offer to make it right, so the second time it happened, I didn't contact him about it. I just won't be buying anything else from him again.

You need to contact eBay there is an open investigation right now. Help get him banned so he stops doing this to people. He is disreputable.

Is there any way to submit a written complaint to Ebay (I have 4 points I want to raise)?

When I checked, it looks like you have to complain about a specific transaction, or call them.

I contacted them on the chat line. If you look on your transaction history page you can fin all your purchases for about five years. Give them whatever info you have and they can find the purchase. Even though it is past the timeline on their money back guarantee you can insist on a fraud investigation. Mine is in the fraud investigation department. This seller knows that by the time you bloom his plants and find out they are not what was advertised that the time limit will be up. He is laughing at all of us. If enough people notify eBay and insist on a fraud investigation he will be banned from selling.

It's unlikely eBay will do a fraud investigation and even if they do then they won't tell anyone except the seller and that will only be after the investigation is complete.

The only way he will be removed is if people don't just leave negative feedback but also open Item Not as Described (INAD) cases. If he doesn't respond or if Ebay needs to get involved then he will get a defect on his account. If there are enough defects, then he will be removed either temporarily or permanently.

Late Edit

I want to say I am not advocating for or against his removal, just explaining how EBay works in this regard.

Since you are both from Florida, why don't you drive over and confront him face to face about this? If you are still dissatisfied after the confrontation then bring a policeman with you and file a complaint not only to the municipal court but also the small business bureau. Ebay is definitely not the place to make Marblekg pay for his deceits.

I thought that same thing Bud, but you don’t really advise that in Florida....we have a bad habit of shooting first


It is not a bad idea to contact the Sarasota sheriffs dept and ask if they have a fraud unit regarding sales and such?

If he is selling things under false names that is not legal. Not sure about the mechanics of the enforcement but I’d start there

I don’t know why you are angry with me. First of all the address of vendors is not available on eBay. Neither is their real name only the city. That would be four hours one way. I definitely would not involve the police department over a $40 plant. They have better things to do. Apparently you don’t know what eBay is all about. They have rules to protect the buyers from unscrupulous sellers. That is why they have a money back guarantee. Your anger is better directed at sellers like this one. My only intent was to make unsuspecting orchid growers aware of this person so they don’t get burned.

I am not sure who your comment is directed at about being angry but I it is me, I am definitely not angry and was certainly not trying to come across as such. And I am very sorry if I did.

No one is angry at you. Find the box or the Paypal order receipt and the real name and address is there. Even if it is merely $40 it is still fraud and it is a criminal offence both local and federal.

I talked to PayPal (which is owned by eBay, so it's essentially the same as talking to eBay), and the guy I talked to said that yes, it's too late to open any kind of dispute, but he did say, "We do monitor all accounts and do take action on accounts when necessary. Unfortunately I am not able to discuss anything that may be happening on those accounts." Which may be him just blowing me off because there's nothing they can do, or it may mean that they are investigating marblekg.

For the last 12 months, there are 1000 positives, 5 neutrals, and only 3 negatives in the feedback profile.

Yeah, he's got a pretty clever scam going here. He lists popular plants that he knows people will buy, then he sends them whatever he has, and the plants look good when they arrive, so the buyer leaves a positive rating. After a couple years when the plant gets big enough to bloom, and the buyer realizes they didn't get the plant they ordered, there's nothing they can do. They can't go back and change the positive feedback rating. So of course most of his feedback is positive. It takes a year or two before people realize they've been had.

No, do not contact Ebay or Paypal….if you log in to your Paypal account, you can trace your receipt and invoices you paid by date....and on the receipt you paid for the item from Marblekg…..you will see the real name and the address of the seller.

Is there a way to block sellers on ebay so that I can add him to some block list and he wont even appear in my list of results when i search?

And leave a flaming paper bag of dog poop on his doorstep? That sounds like a lot of fun, but I don't think it will help the situation much. I did notice on my PayPal invoices that the name of his operation is Gary's Orchids.

---------- Post added at 12:38 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:35 AM ----------

There is, and I've done it before, and it's complicated and I don't remember how I did it. You go to the search settings, and you can exclude certain sellers from your searches, but as I recall it was not user friendly and it took me a while to figure out how to do it.

I was recently browsing eBay to see if anything interesting was on there, and I came across RLC George King 'Southern Cross', a plant I have coveted relentlessly, but have been unable to find. It is much less popular than the 'Serendipity' clone, which you can find anywhere (and which I of course already have). I got excited. The plant was near blooming size for 30 dollars, which is on the high end, but not outrageous, and I want it bad enough that I would pay 30 dollars for it.

But then, I realized the seller was Marblekg. I was crushed. I sent him a message saying that every plant I have ever bought from him turned out to be the wrong plant entirely, and is there any way he could assure me that this plant was definitely George King 'Southern Cross'. This is the response he sent me:

"I am sorry the plants bloomed out something else. Please remember I buy 1000s of plants. Sometimes the tags are wrong and I do not know until the plants bloom. My supplier is aware of this and says there is nothing he can do. I can only list plants as they are tagged. Once again I apologize. As far as I know they are what they are tagged. Thank you"

"As far as I know, they are what they are tagged." What a line. The fact is that he has no idea whether the plants are what they are tagged or not.

So basically no, he cannot assure me that it is the right plant, and he seems to feel no sense of remorse over this. He actually said that there's nothing he can do. Maybe he ought to find a different supplier of plants if the guy he's buying from can't keep his tags straight. At any rate, I won't be buying the plant. I'll keep looking, and I'm sure one will turn up eventually.

wow, that is balls but i do appreciate that he was at least up front about his terrible business practices lol

I hear that he lurks here, and after all the critical things I've said about him in this and other threads, he probably wouldn't sell me the plant anyway, even if I wanted it haha.

---------- Post added at 05:39 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:35 PM ----------

Odom's and Hausermann and many of the other big nurseries buy thousands of plants in addition to the ones they grow themselves, and yet somehow they manage to keep the tags straight. It can be done. The only person I've ever got a mislabeled plant from is Marblekg. If the other guys can do it, so could he, if he felt so inclined to put forth the effort to do so.

That is the EXACT same reply I got from him word for word when I contacted him about my plant that bloomed out to be something other than what it was labeled. I replied back to him that his supplier was dishonest and he sent me back a stinging response telling me basically what a crumby person I am for insinuating such a thing about himself and his supplier. Personally I believe his supplier is imaginary and an excuse he has used for years which for some reason makes him think ripping people off is OK. If he was worth a shit he would refund our money. He is the ONLY seller I have ever had a problem with in 43 years. Thank goodness there are reputable growers and vendors out there to deal with. Stay away from this crook.

"Crook" is exactly the correct word to describe him. He's just a crook looking to take advantage of people, and he's got a nice scam going here, because by the time people realize they've been scammed, it is much too late to file a grievance with either eBay or PayPal. He knows this and he takes advantage of it. He's just a crook.

---------- Post added at 08:14 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:12 PM ----------

If anybody sees an RLC George King 'Southern Cross', if you think of it, please feel free to let me know,

[/COLOR]If anybody sees an RLC George King 'Southern Cross', if you think of it, please feel free to let me know,[/QUOTE]

Try contacting Waldor Orchids in NJ. Make sure to specify whether you are looking for a mother division, or whether a meristem is OK.

For what it’s worth, LinkedIn lists a Gary Bienemann
Business Owner at Gary's Orchids Sarasota, Florida. If you search Gary Bienemann, multiple articles turn up about him being fined for misdemeanor orchid poaching.

Try contacting Waldor Orchids in NJ. Make sure to specify whether you are looking for a mother division, or whether a meristem is OK.[/QUOTE]

Thanks for the tip. They don't have it listed on the website, but often these big nurseries have too few of a single plant to put on the website, so I think I will give them a call and see if maybe they have one hiding around there somewhere that they would be willing to part with. They do however have 'Serendipity' for sale on the website, and it seems like they use it for breeding a lot. They have a lot of seedlings of crosses for sale with 'Serendipity' as a parent. So I'll give them a call and see if that gets me anywhere. Thanks so much for your help.

---------- Post added at 11:39 AM ---------- Previous post was at 11:37 AM ----------

Well if he's poaching orchids, we shouldn't be buying from him, whether we get the right plant or not. They ought to shut his orchid business down if he's poaching plants from the wild.

In case anyone's as interested as I was. He already has me blocked on eBay, so:
Something smells, and it’s not an orchid – POLLENATRIX

Yes, that's the article I found when I googled his name. I forwarded the article to eBay, but I don't think it will do any good. eBay doesn't care about anything but making money. They don't care about their customers, and they don't care how their sellers make money, as long as they keep making money.

Sooner or later enough people will find out he is a scamming scum bag and he won’t have any customers

He's got a 99.7% positive feedback rating, with 50 positive ratings from this month alone. If you just look at his feedback, he seems like a great seller. The thing it, it takes people so long to realize they've been scammed, that you can't go back and change that positive feedback rating to negative, so to just look at his stats on eBay, he seems like a great vendor, the kind you would want to buy from. The only people who know that he's a con artist are the people on this and other Orchid discussion boards, and very few people are going to see that feedback rating and then go do some research and see what we're saying about him here. I don't think there's any way he can be stopped. None of us will be buying from him, but there are plenty of people who are buying from him, and it's impossible to get word out to all of his prospective customers. I Just don't think there's any way to bring him down. Like I said, I referred eBay to that article about his illegal poaching of endangered orchids from the wild, but I don't actually expect that to accomplish anything.

All that being said, I do really like the NoID he sent me instead of C. percivaliana. I'd rather have C perci, but the plant I got from him wasn't a bad plant. It was in good health when it arrived, and it bloomed within a year of buying it. It has huge floofy, round magenta flowers with very nice form, which are huge (about 7 inches), especially compared to the size of the plant, which is maybe 9 inches tall from rhizome to leaf tip, and I think it's in bud again now. It's not something I would have picked out for myself, but once it bloomed, I thought, "That's not perci, but it's really not a bad plant." I don't want to sound like I'm defending him, because he's a crook and a con man, and I want nothing to do with him, but just for the sake of making the best out of a crappy situation, the plant he sent me really is quite nice.

Here's a few pictures from last year when it bloomed for the first time.

Have not bought from him in over a year, but we just bloomed a plant we bought a year ago, and it is clearly not what it should be. We ordered a rare clone of Rlc. Goldenzelle, and the plant bloomed with pink flowers.

A long time ago, I managed to block certain Ebay sellers, but I have forgotten how. I really would like to get rid of his listings, so if anyone knows how it is done today, please explain.

If you go under advanced search on the desktop site, you can type a seller name in the field indicated on the 'sellers' pane; after doing so, toggle from 'include' to 'exclude'; run the search and the seller is excluded.

Any pics of what the flowers should have looked like?

I think I wouldn't be buying from that seller based on the details being mentioned about that seller here (if I were in USA that is).

Here's a related OrchidBoard link too (click here).

It was supposed to be Rlc Goldenzelle 'Orange Pumpkin'. I do not have a photo, but it comes up if you google it.

Beware of buying from marblekg!
 

I recently came to the realization that I have been completely defrauded by Ebay orchid seller (marblekg) after spending hundreds of dollars over the years. I had always assumed if I was buying a plant whose nomenclature indicated that it was a meristem, that is what I was really getting. However, I recently asked him to confirm that the plant I had bought, C. gaskelliana 'Blue Dragon,' was a meristem. He responded that it was not. I told him that I was now wondering how many of the plants I had bought from him were actually self-crosses and not clones. His response: "Some are and probably some aren't." Please join me in trying to put a stop to this criminal activity.

Belated question.

Did you ever find your RLC George King 'Southern Cross'?
-Keith

Those looking for Cattleya percivaliana 'Summit': I bought a medium sized, near blooming size plant from Alan Koch of Gold Country Orchids about a year ago. I didn't ask whether it was originally a meristem or division.