MallForAfrica – DHL Africa Eshop $5 Shipment Protection SCAM????

For weeks now, I’ve been trying to understand the non-refundable Shipment Value Protection of $5 DHL Africa Eshop recently introduced. Their customer care reps on Twitter were pretty clueless as to what the charge was all about and simply said, you can ignore it and place your order.

I wasn’t comfortable with that so I did some googling and discovered what the $5 insurance fee most probably protects against.

Apparently there’s a limit to how much DHL can refund you in the event that your goods get lost or damaged in transit. For example, if you’re goods are worth $100 (shipping included) and something happens to them, DHL MIGHT only refund part of that $100 instead of the whole thing.

This what their Shipment Value Protection page says

This reminds me of one of my transactions with them in which my order was damaged twice in transit. Eventually we settled on them refunding the cost of the goods minus shipping fee while I keep the damaged goods.

After discovering this, I always pay the $5 insurance fee to avoid stories that touch and I personally highly recommend you do the same.

UPDATE: 6th April, 2020

This whole $5 Shipment Insurance Fee looks like the easiest scam ever to me. I placed an order just before the Nigerian government stopped all shipments coming into Nigeria due to this Coronavirus pandemic.

I saw a notice to this on the DHL Eshop app and thus contacted them to find out what would happen to my order. You can read the thread below

@MFAcustomercare good afternoon. Just got this notification on the app. So my pending order is on hold till after the lockdown right? 🤔 pic.twitter.com/R6pl00ClRT

— Udegbunam Chukwudi (@UdegbunamChuks) April 1, 2020

Eventually my order was canceled but the $5 Shipment Insurance Fee wasn’t refunded at all

I just got an email that my order was cancelled due to the airport lockdown but my $5 insurance fee wasn’t included. You charge insurance too for cancelled orders? 🤔

Isn’t the $5 insurance meant to apply to only shipped orders?

— Udegbunam Chukwudi (@UdegbunamChuks) April 2, 2020

You can read the entire exchange directly on Twitter or these screenshots

Summary of the exchange above

1. Like I told you guys in the beginning of this post, that $5 insurance fee protects your order and money and they have finally confirmed it. If you don’t pay the insurance fee and your order gets cancelled or goods damaged, you lose EVERYTHING!
2.  As this tweet reply confirms the insurance fee is meant to cover damaged shipped orders only but for some reason, they have unscrupulously extended it to cancelled orders as well. Notice how they didn’t even go into details on their order page what happens if one skips paying the insurance fee.
3. Now as the Holy Spirit or Evil Spirit leads, they can decide to start cancelling orders and making mad profit off customers without shipping shit. If you paid insurance, they keep the $5 and refund the rest of the money and if you didn’t pay insurance, you lose EVERYTHING!

At this point, I have to start looking into better ways of shipping items into the country since these ones just like ShippyMe, Circuit Atlantic before them have decided to start roaming mad!

For now I’m stuck with them. FUCK!

Tragic how good things always have a way of coming to an end

Have a great week guys!

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