What happens if i refuse to pay for a customs charge on my parcel from the US?
If you refuse to pay it will either get sent back to the sender or just get destroyed by customs. The sender is legally obligated to put the true value (or the amountit was sold for) on the form. Anything else is fraud and you are asking the seller to commit a crime. We sent a $20 manual from the US to Canada via UPS. They were asking the customer in Canada to pay a $22 fee for a $20.00 manual. Sometimes the value doesn’t matter much. If you refuse, you are not eligible for a refund.
That’s an awkward one because legally the seller was totally in the right to put the correct value on the form and putting a false value on was fraud. So the seller could argue that legally she’s in the right and you’re not. The package will sit in a Royal Mail office for at least 6 months and then get either returned to sender or ‘destroyed’ (‘destroyed’ doesn’t usually actually mean destroyed, it means that Royal Mail staff either take the contents as their own or Royal Mail get to auction the item off as their property.) Next time, you’ve got to factor in the customs charge into the cost of buying internationally- no matter what you ask the seller to do.
