Fraud Warning!

A follow up to my previous discussion, “Bad Business”. For anyone considering purchasing a Merlin whistle from Wizard of Kells DBA Rijnbeek Ireland, the business appears to be a scam. The seller accepted payment but after a month had not sent the whistle and did not responded to three emails inquiring about it. He has also not responded to inquires from both Paypal and my credit card company.

I did recover my money through my credit card but felt it needful to warn other potential customers.

Thanks for the warning Michael.

Also… Henry, the guy who made Merlin whistles, died a few years ago so anyone claiming to sell the whistles must have old stock.

Well done Michael!

The site is poorly set up. It’s important to double check any shop you don’t know and which gives little to no information *about* the business before sending money.

Two YT comments assert the owner has been dead 2 to 4 years. This may be so. Still the site is active, someone accepted my payment and the email is still receiving emails. It seems quite odd that a business site and its email would remain operational 2 years past the owner’s death.

The Merlin Whistle site is down. I think it has been since 2016.

@AB - How down? I still find it on the web and someone accepted my payment. Also the three email inquiries I sent did not come back as “undeliverable” which generally happens with nonactive addresses. It appears someone may be using the site fraudulently.

If the web site’s registration has lapsed (for instance, because the original owner has died and failed to pay the registration fee) another party could purchase it. Someone could also purchase the business, name, product names, website, plans, equipment, and existing stock from the deceased owner’s heirs or estate. Or from the owner himself, if he were allive enough to consent to it, or from whoever liquidates the assets of a business in receivership (or whatever bankruptcy is called in Soctland). Still doesn’t get you your whistle, alas.

Searching the owner’s name returns results connected to manufacturing in India.

@Tracie - India?! The site claims the whistles are, or were, handmade in Scotland. And yes, alas I did not get a whistle, though I did get my money refunded. Still, just from curiosity, I’d like to know the full story of what is going on. Would the payment have sat uncollected in some now nonexistent business or is some new owner of the site engaged in fraud?

Henry’s website was merlin-music.com. I don’t recognise the site you tried to purchase the whistle from and I’m not sure it had any connection to Merlin Music. The site has been about since 2010 though, so maybe they had some sort of distribution deal with Henry.

@bagpie - I have not encountered the site you mention. The site I tried to purchase from, Wizard of Kells, claimed to be selling Merlin whistles.

“Henry’s website *was* merlin-music.com.” (past tense). Yes, that was the domain name for the site which
I believe was taken down in 2016.

Michael, the site you found probably did have an arrangement with the maker of Merlin whistles. But that’s based on speculation since the Wizard of Kells shop does not provide much information about it’s business. Henry’s site, on the other hand, had plenty of information for anyone looking to buy a whistle from his shop.

Ben

Hello. I’m Henry the Whistlemaker’s wife, and I’ve just found this thread. Henry died suddenly in February 2017 and the website, Facebook page and email were all de-activated at that time. We used to sell whistles wholesale to Theo Rijnbeek, aka the Wizard of Kells, and I think he had other websites as well. He seemed a pleasant enough guy, and we exchanged some fairly chatty emails. Then he began to be slow at paying his bills … and then he disappeared altogether leaving one of our bills unpaid. That was in mid 2011. We thought that some financial disaster must have overtaken him and he’d gone back to Belgium.
So there you have it!

To Jenny Tarbatt

I have just seen your comment on this thread. I was one of your customers about 10 years ago and am greatly saddened to hear your news. I hope you are OK .

Henry’s whistles are the best I’ve played. I have a C, a Bb and a metal D7 and I’ll treat them as irreplaceable now. The D7 is my goto whistle if I ever need to be heard! I had hoped for a low F but he took them off the website as he claimed they were not good enough.

Regards,
Martin