MacAddict Tracks Down eBay Scam Artist

OS24Ever writes "A future high school history teacher, Jason Eric Smith, sold an 867MHz PowerBook G4 on eBay right before finals. He found out the hard way that people are out there to rip you off, and he went to great lengths to catch this guy with the help of Mac heads everywhere. A great read and agreat way for us little guys to get back at these scammers."

Comments

Punishment?

[JThaddeus]

Wasn't it punishment enough just to give someone a 867MHz PowerBook G4?

no police force

[moosemoose]

.. might be better than having any police force at all. ok that's a slight exageration, but lets face it, for most of us the police are simply another governmental agency which issues paperwork that we have to submit to our insurance company along with our claim and THAT'S IT. i would be interested in knowing the percentage of people who have been victims of property crimes who have had a situation where the police actually solved their case. (in my life 3 home burglaries, 2 car thefts: none solved. i don't even bother reporting the small stuff like vandalism or theft from a car).

in the absence of a police force we'd have about 60 days of chaos, a fair amount of frontier justice and then things would settle down with community organizations that really got some work done. by the way, the fact that a small police force actually helped in his case once again illustrates the fact that the larger an organization becomes, the less likely it is to serve the interests of its 'customers'.

rant over.

Re:Hired to steal checks?

[Kafka_Canada]

Hint: Try not splittig your infinitives, you sound like a moron.

What a Dumbass

[g_bit]

Okay, sure I'll just ship ya that 3,000$ piece of equipment before your check clears, no problem.

And he thinks PC users are stupid.

Who's the scammer here?

[cybermace5]

I don't know why everyone here thinks this is SO COOL.

This guy buys and sells laptops...ok.

He buys ~$3000 laptop for himself, and then decides he doesn't want it. He sells it, C.O.D. for crying out loud, to someone with zero completed auctions.

Oh wait, he sold it to this guy yet this guy still has no completed auctions? Yes folks, in the article, our Mac boy states that he sold the laptop to videopro55, who contacted him with an offer for $2900. That's outside of the eBay auction, and directly in violation of eBay policy to sell outside of auction. It's not fair to the people who placed bids (he said there were bids on it already) on the laptop...one of them won it, right? Where's their laptop they rightfully won?

So in summary, we have a story of a guy doing triage work, because he went around eBay policy and essentially defrauded his own legitamate bidders. Remember, the auction is legally binding, and you agree to this when you sign up for an eBay account.

I don't feel sorry for him. And notice how the Paypal donation fund is conveniently mentioned, along with how broke he is after the mean scammer guy took his laptop.

Re:Funny

[Dan D.]

I'd guess he is a "Glass is half full" kind of guy.

You'd have to be, as a Mac user. :)

Slightly misleading title...

[unicorn]

I think the editor should have called it MacBigot...

The anti-PC rhetoric in a couple places was pretty tiresome.