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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.
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.
Wow, well done.. and some of us saw it three weeks ago as it actually happened on the Something Awful forums.
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.
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
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
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"
Under UK law, there are four requirements for a contract: offer, acceptance, consideration and intent to create legal relations.
Yes, there most definately was an eBay auction.