Missing Owner

[oddquestion]

Hey,

Looking for a bit of advice.

On a SIM I have played for years, the game owner has been incredibly inactive for over a year now.  Others & myself have seen them posting using their company name in various places during this time however, so know they haven't completely disappeared, they just don't seem interested in their game/s. Others have attempted to contact them via these places, but the owner ignores the messages, and then disappears from that site, occasionally reappearing, but soon disappear again if sent a message.

There are a few long term issues with the game, but the most important one at the moment is that the RL money store for merchandise and game upgrades is still active, but upgrades haven't been processing automatically for at least 18 months.
The contact forms haven't been working since the last update was posted (October '17, but there was known issues before that too), and the personal email someone "leaked" seems to be rarely looked at either. Occasionally a game moderator logs in (once every few weeks if that), and they somehow manage to get the game owner to do their job. They also remove all the "where's my upgrade?" posts at the same time, so there is no warning for anyone else to see.
Another thing not told is that the upgrade is a yearly subscription, so the forums end up with pissed ex-players coming back to rant, as they quit before their upgrade was processed, and now they have been charged again. These posts end up deleted too.

The merchandise store doesn't seem to send things out either, but there is only one post about that from 9 months ago, and the player is no longer active to ask if they ever did recieve their items or manage to get a refund.

Old players have their upgrade legacied in, so don't have to pay the subscription, and know the owner is missing so don't purchase anything, but there is multiple new players every month who don't, and as said above, the posts about it are deleted.

This ended up a lot longer then I thought, but TL:DR, is there any thing we can do? Anyone we can report the game owner to?

 

 

[Mobotropolis]

Since this is an incident involving Real World money why not give the game's name?

That might prevent other unsuspecting users/players from potentially being scammed. 

As far as legal action goes, you might want to check your Terms and Conditions. Many-a-game has protections in place that do not fault them in case something goes wrong during a transaction. Essentially, they wouldn't be on the hook if you paid for a product and you never received it, they decided to take it back, they terminated your account, and whatnot. 

Even so, you might not be completely up the creek. If you paid for something with your debit or credit card and never received it you may be able to file a dispute with your credit or debit card company to attempt to get your money back.