With the initial controversy and buzz surrounding the OnePlus One having now died down, winners of the company’s ‘Smash the Past’ contest have been getting their devices and while we reported on one winner who received their OnePlus One in fairly timely manner and was quite pleased with it, besides a small manufacturing defect, there were other less than pleased winners. Yesterday, we all heard the story of a OnePlus One winner from Italy who was so excited to unbox his One right from the mail that he started filming his unboxing for all to see on YouTube. What we ended up seeing however, was an empty box from OnePlus, with nothing inside of it.
OnePlus is of course a new company, and a very small one at that, so mistakes are fairly likely to be made and not even the biggest smartphone names in the industry are immune to slip-ups at their factories. OnePlus has sent us a statement regarding the empty box issues and as we expected, the company is making things right and the winner already has a new device en route and OnePlus will be looking into things: “Regarding the user who received an empty box, we immediately arranged to send him a new device. Each package is inspected before being shipped and the device in question has been lost in transit. Our policy is to first make things right for the customer, and we are now working with our courier partner to find out exactly what happened and find ways to avoid this is in the future.”
Anything could have happened concerning this empty box shenanigan, it could have been a mistake at the packing facility on OnePlus’ end (though we highly doubt such a thing) or it could have been stolen by an errant courier worker on its long journey from China to Italy. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time something like that has happened. We’re just hoping that this doesn’t happen again and it sure sounds like OnePlus will be working hard to make sure it doesn’t.