[Filament]

So probably best advisable to be persistent with my initial excuse of it caught fire.

Or get a different serial number?

You can keep the same. If they ask about it, mention how you were trying to sell it on <auctioning site> a while ago (note the date) but decided to keep it.

And I personally don't like giving up on an SE until I know for sure it's failed. I would just keep going - tell them that the garbage men have disposed of it while you were away at work.

DELL is one of those companies you can't really SE that much anymore because they've been raped so much with their laptops.

Interesting. I had a really easy experience with them until they retracted the package due to internal investigation not passing. I would assume if you have the legit info and.a drop, Dell is still easy without issue.

I decided to persist with the initial excuse of it catching fire, as I went to the serial number look up page on dell once again. entered mine and played around with all the options, eventually I found one that stated that my serial number had an open case. Thus my initial concern, was indeed correct.

Therefore, I began trying to find ways of providing photo evidence of this "fire". I realized that on one of my current outdated asus monitors, the power supply cable and port look extremely similar to the one on the Dell monitor that I am trying to SE. A chefs blowtorch, disconnected fire alarm and 10 minutes later I have my photo evidence proof of my £500 Dell gaming monitor catching fire 

However I seem to have not been able to get in contact with their customer service department after I got home from work (as per my story). Even tried calling an hour before their "supposed" closing time, but got the automated message to call back tomorrow. (no one responding on the whatsapp chat either for some reason). Regardless, ill try update tomorrow if anything new happens.

Yup, that sounds right. I'd be really surprised if the rep didn't mark anything on the case.
ahaha nice. Would you mind sending me a PM of the picture(s)? I'm sure it'll be very helpful for future reference.