- Happy occasion of son's birthday turned into a nightmare by zomato ^Open

Archana V.G. filed this complaint against Zomato on Jul 21, 2019

Order No. **********
Also, the bigger issue I want to highlight is how zomato manipulated/inserted chat text attributing to me which I did not type. I have elaborated this below.
All timestamps below are taken directly from Zomato app:
I had placed an order through Zomato as per above order number at *:** pm on July **, ****. However since I did not use an available coupon for **%, I wanted to cancel the order and again order using the discount coupon. However, since the Zomato chatapp/room was busy and I was told to wait, I immediately called up the delivery person at *:** pm (phone record attached) to tell the hotel people to not process the order. He instead suggested calling the hotel directly since the Zomata chat room was busy. Then I called Nandini Deluxe Hotel at *:** pm and they said there is no issue since food is not prepared and agreed to not process the order. Later at *:** pm Zomato tech support was available and I told them to cancel the order and the order was cancelled. Then I asked when I can expect the refund from Zomato to my Paytm account, I got the shock of my life. I was told that I had been penalized Rs. **** as a penalty for cancellation as per new policy and told to write to order@zomato.com for resolution of this issue.
So my husband wrote to them to say why they didn’t inform at the time of cancelling the order that order value of Rs. **** would be deducted as penalty.
Then I saw the chat conversation again in the Zomato app and the text/conversation seemed to have been managed and manipulated. The one text I could easily remember was a text that had been inserted in the conversation which wasn’t there before at *:** pm as follows.
"Cancelling the order now will cost you a cancellation fee of Rs. **** because food preparation has begun. Please confirm if you would still like to cancel the order". In the first place, I was cancelling the order because I didn’t apply a discount coupon and I wanted to save some money of Rs. *** or ***. Why would I agree to a penalty of Rs **** and also not receive the food in the process?
Later on, I also spoke to Nandini Deluxe and the person in charge there told since they didn't prepare or pack the food, they had no issue in cancelling the order. He in fact told me to ask the Zomato people to call him and he will ask to refund the money. He further told me to order from them directly instead of using the Zomata app. I later ordered exactly the same item again from Swiggy for which the order receipt is attached. So why in the world would I agree for a cancellation charge of Rs **** if I was going to order the same thing?
Now the bigger issue is apart from the refund issue doesn't this amount to fraud and forgery where they have inserted text attributed to me which I haven’t typed. In fact, I can actually prove this. When they have changed/inserted text they forgot to change the timestamps of the chat they inserted. Normally the chat people/bot would take more than * to * minutes to reply based on other chats I had with them but if you see this whole conversation (screenshot attached) of about ** lines and more than *** words, it's all happening in a period of one minute exactly at *:** pm! This is not possible even if some of them were bot replies.
These people could literally type in whatever they want to be attributed to me and in future do the same to others when it doesn’t suit them and just to prove they are right and cheat people of their money. What is their problem if the hotel themselves didn’t have any issues. This is criminal and dangerous and I want to make people aware of this shady and nefarious stuff that Zomato is doing to fleece money from innocent people and they call themselves a new-age startup.
If they can do this to me who has been a loyal customer of theirs, imagine what is going to happen to other innocent people who aren’t net-savvy. I can understand if I was a serial offender. I hadn’t cancelled even a single time before. Further, they are manipulating text to try to prove they are right. If these people cannot differentiate between loyal customers and offenders, this would be the start of their downfall.
Apart from this complaint through you, I will take all steps to make people aware of Zomato's criminality and daylight robbery. Please let me know the next steps to recover my money from these cheaters.

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