Slashdot Mirror
P-P-P-PowerBook for a S-S-S-Scammer...
kormoc writes "It all started with a ebay auction when the seller got a email from a dude who wanted to scam him. It was a normal setup and it went horribly wrong... for the scammer. This has turned from a awful plight for a ebay user to a wonderful prank on the scammer. Throw in some crazy brits with digicams and you have the making of a great story.
Mirror
Mirror"
That should get the coffee out your nostrils on a fine sunday morning. Note that you have to download the PDF to read the story.
Oh yea, Fark had it yesterday...
"Man sells PowerBook on Ebay, gets fraudulent offer, sends scammer p-p-p-powerbook instead"
This originally started off as a "I think this guy is trying to rip of me off" post on the SA forums. Through the magic of peer pressure and paypal, it blossomed into this wonderful production.
The thread is now in the Comedy Goldmine here and has over 3200 replies and 3/4ths of a million page views.
This originated at the Somethingawful forums; we followed the thread day-by-day as the events unfolded.
d .php?s= &threadid=1016390
You can find the original thread here:
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthrea
Thanks to MyNameIsJeff and the SA forum community for a good laugh.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Just start about halfway through the original thread and you'll get the minute-by-minute updates as they await for delivery. Pretty funny.
= &threadid=1016390&perpage=40&pagenumber=69
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s
Having read it all, here I go with a summary:
A guy was selling an Apple Laptop and a scammer offered to buy it. The scam was revealed when the scammer tried to do the payment through a fake escrow site. The seller then shipped the "laptop" in the pictures along with some heavy books so the package would feel like the real deal.
The seller then got donations via paypal to pay the $180 for shipment. The really funny part is that he had to give a value of the package and he said $2000. The scammer then had to pay a tax of the package value to actually recieve the package.
It wasn't all that easy. It almost didn't happend but FedEx trace-system confirms that the scammer actually paid customs to get the package released...that's how it ends! Read the entire story - it's funny!
The real moral of this story, I think, is don't get involved in interstate (that's state as in country, not as in US state) commerce unless you really know what you are doing, and you are going to be doing it often enough to make all the aggravation worthwhile. The scammer was obviously too dim to realise this since he hadn't realised in advance he would have to pay import duty and Value Added Tax, or even that someone might send him a fake parcel.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Read the MOTHERFUCKING FIRST LINE OF THE ARTICLE YOU STUPID FUCK. Jesus, every day people get dumber. What next, people posting about how it's a disgrace the pope isn't catholic?
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
I would also like to point out that this seller defrauded Paypal, Fedex, eBay
Did you even READ the damn story? The "transaction" went through a FAKE ESCROW SERVICE, not Paypal. The scammer did NOT buy the item through ebay, it was settled outside of ebay.
Read->Comprehend->Post.
The "payment" for the P-P-P-Powerbook was a fake escrow site. It seems the scammer spent a few hundred GBP of his own money to release the package from customs, and a bunch of SomethingAweful goons put up the money for the FedEx shipment in the first place. But no innocent person is out any money.
Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two.
Here is a HTML version of the PDF file... http://www.mannequin3d.com/powerbook/
http://seanism.com/
Somethingawful.com is the mastermind site behind all of this (couldn't find it mentioned in the pdf) but the address to their forum is forums.somethingawful.com and the original thread on their forum was here: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s= &threadid=1016390
It's a rather hilarious site and if you haven't explored all of their comedy goldmines and photoshop phridays you probably ought to give those a rundown, too.
Enjoy!
nice big shot of the barber shop
:-)
lil' movie of the street
movie of the package delivery
possible pic of the scammer
Great media coverage... beats CNN
Now, I must know, who is the bigger idiot. The parent poster or the dimwits who modded this?
> Couldn't he just return it? He had just bought it a few days earlier.
Did either (poster or moderator) even RTFA? First, it wasn't his (selling it for someone else), and second it was 9 days past the date it could be returned.
> the guy that wrote it is very creative and a gifted writer!
So, you read enough to realize the original author was a 'gifted' writer, but couldn't even comprehend the premise of the situation? Having read it myself, 'gifted' would have been the last word I would have choosen for a description.
So to answer the question:
No, he couldn't return it, you fucking twit. Please don't post until your reading skills are at least at the level of a 9 year old.
The return limit is 10 days. It was 19 days old when they first put it on ebay according to the first page of the pdf. There's really no reason it would have taken the friend 9 days to put something up.
;p
It's not that much of a stretch for the "just days" comment to still apply. Much better fit than assuming it takes 9 days to write an ebay ad and/or assuming a scammer would make up all these stupid details like this (and then only ask a dollar from anyone who wants).
That is what he said on his aucton site to avoid difficulties selling someone else's thing.
The original seller made an honest offer. He had the real product, and it was a legitimate auction.
He only decided to send the dummy laptop after it was established that the buyer was using a false name, phone number, and escrow site, with the intent to defraud the seller. If the buyer has no intention of holding up his end of the contract (paying for the laptop) then the seller is not bound to send a real laptop.
If the buyer attempts to recover the import duties through civil court, then he exposes himself to criminal prosecution. Further, his claim in civil court would likely be easily denied based on the doctrine of unclean hands--that is, "...a party who is asking for a judgment cannot have the help of the court if he/she has done anything unethical in relation to the subject of the lawsuit."
~Idarubicin
Remember the scammer gave a fake phone number to Fedex and when it couldn't be used to contact him, he went and paid the customs duties to Fedex in cash. There are no credit cards involved.
He didn't. I actually read the whole story (the PDF, not the 82-page original thread) before I posted. The declaration said something like "computer equipment," and he included a CD-ROM drive in the package in case anyone actually checked. The fraud was not in the declaration, but in the agreement. It's all moot since the guy was trying to scam him, but he agreed to send the PowerBook (actual computer) prior to the "buyer" sending payment through an escrow company.
Not only there is a HTML version, but a TXT version too.
Cheers
As one of 33000 members of the SA forums I'll tell you that what goes on in those forums isnt organized by Lowtax or the other admins/mods. It's just people posting in a forum that just happens to generate lots of content from time to time that actually is worth encouraging people to "check this out"
This exchange was less formal than selling a used microwave via post-it note on the lunchroom bulletin board. The scammer contacted MyNameIsJeff on his own after the eBay auction ended.
Notice that the "victim" asks the scammer about how he is going to get his money since he never gave his bank account info, address or the like.
Bah! You have no idea of true scambaiting art. This is art. A gripping tale of dark dark horror and greed. Guaranteed to spook you silly. Or not. =)
Seriously, anyone can get scammers to pose for silly photographs, but this tale was something completely extraordinary.
Okay, the 419eater scams are still funny enough, though... I particularly liked the one where the scammer tried to pass off photo from Vatican as a photo of their church =)
It's true that eBay policy doesn't allow you to circumvent their fee system by selling a listed item to an eBay user outside of eBay. But in this case, there was an auction winner, and eBay got their cut of the sale.
The seller scammed the scammer, but he didn't defraud eBay. He probably should have reported the off-site offer to eBay instead of taking the matter into his own hands, but he correctly guessed that there would be no complaints from the actual winner nor from the scammer.
You have it backwards. SA does not want millions of pagehits and advertising is flat rate and CHEAP (not impression or click through based). SA is the site that redirected to goatse for links from slashdot b/c the traffic wasn't welcome.
SA is a fairly tight-knit community which is interested in new PARTICIPANTS, but isn't interested in fark-style "OMG WE GOT 3284324 HITS!!!" style people or pure leechers.
It's all about what you can contribute to the whole.
The only scam-style things on SA are the "true media" reviews, which are meant to draw out crazy rabid fans of XYZ, and are blatently obvious if you're not a complete idiot.
Under UK law, there are four requirements for a contract: offer, acceptance, consideration and intent to create legal relations.
When I read after that point earlier today, it seemed like there was basically:
speculation about how much the Barber knew; (Most people figured he just lets the Romanian and possibly others make use of his shady establishment for a fee)
expressions of desire to steal an official Jean Climax mug;
discussion about what the next step should be, and whether or not there should be a next step;
an increasing number of content-free posts from newcomers who came to this thread from fark, metafilter, slashdot, etc.;
posts from SA regulars decrying this incursion.
By the way, was it this phone number? Just curious.
huh? the whole escrow service was the scam... the scammer set up a fake website that appeared to be secured and verified somehow... in fact the website apparently was taken down as soon as the package was shipped... not to mention the domain was connected to an individual not a company and and how could you not see that it is an obvious scam?
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Yes, there most definately was an eBay auction.
You really need to improve your reading comprehension skills, Cranx. To assist you, I'll repost what I said before, with the relevant information highlighted so you can better understand the crux of the biscuit:
THE VERISIGN POPUP WAS A COPY HOSTED ON THE FAKE ESCROW SITE ITSELF. The escrow site, for that matter, was swimming in sloppy, unprofessional english.
There will be a test on this tomorrow.
Perhaps none of us read the whole thread closely enough. I know I got kinda tired around page 78 (* 40 posts per page) but I made it to 80 before the mods pruned it.
::jafomatic
**** spoiler ahead *******
goon "rhig"'s post from upstairs the barber shop: