Update from hell - or thereabouts - A word of warning

[Jock]

Hey, first post in TT forum -

I bought a new in the box GO720 last November and it was off an ebay seller in Australia.
I asked for the Australia and Western Europe maps which were supplied - they offered some different maps.
I used the unit in AU and UK till I updated the application to 8.391.1908 from 8.010 on Dec21 - the GPS then went into the power cycle of death mode and made no sense. I tried resetting it, I changed the app back to a prior version then the maps would not work - I called the TomTom guys and it seems the unit was sold as new but was a refurb from the US. I had AU and EU maps on a GPS with an affinity for US/CAN maps and there is no way these AU and Western Europe maps will work on the GPS with the new app having just visited.
A reformat and a few other things were attempted before the help person twigged that my GPS came from EBAY.
Be warned, unless the ebay seller is through AMAZON (apparently) they (TT) will not warrant the unit in times of woe. They do however try to help the user over the phone to get back to working status.
To sort it quickly, I have purchased the AU maps for ~AU$140.00 and it's all working again including the safety camera thing but the weather function has gone - seems the PLUS features were loaded on the mule applicaton the GPS shipped with. The seller in Oz was user 'szwedal' who has all but vanished though I doubt they would be of any help were I to contact them.

So, the moral of my story is that I would have been better to buy a retail version through a store here in Sydney and have less hassles. Though the maps in the UK worked a treat and saved a lot of hassles...

Great forum - I have followed the instruction to replace my 720's battery - great document and I now get ages off a charge instead of the 5 minutes I always had (prolly the reason my GPS went as a refurb in the first place?). These guys must buy them from a seller / TT whatever and ship them everywhere with a generic dataset loaded on them.
Live & learn.
Cheers,
Jock

 

[mikealder]

Welcome to the forum Jock, shame you had such an experiance with your 720 but I always say if something on E-Bay looks to good to be true then it probably is either stolen or in the case of navigation devices loaded with hacked maps.
I have recently reported a number of sellers from Australia on e-bay for selling stolen / illegal kit and I will continue to do so whenever I spot such an advert, rather costly introduction to ownling a 720 for you though - Mike

 

[dhn]

Welcome to TTF!

Unfortunately, we've been getting numerous users from Oz the last few weeks reporting the same thing, getting a unit from ebay with, as it turns out, hacked software and maps. As a consequece, when the unit gets updated to a proper software application, the ability to lose the cracked maps is gone.

You may get some recourse if you paid by PayPal or used a credit card company and report to them you were a victim of fraud. Because you were

 

[Arno]

Hello Jock,

It may be little comfort to you reading this thread but maybe you can recover some of your monies.

 

[Jock]

Well, I sent an email to the seller and received a reply as follows:

"Hi I thing [sic] its time to update your GPS and buy new maps from tomtom
Thank you
"
makes me feel not confident of any guilt or intent to make me feel like the seller cares.

OK, I might send all my information off to ebay and see if I can get the seller check their gear on sale a bit more thoroughly. I am not impressed.

Thanks for all the replies - as I said, live & learn and don't buy off sellers on ebay.
Jock