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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.
If you had read through the article, like I know no one does here, you would have found that the guy bought this for a project that was canned 19 days after he purchased the item. The return policy stated that he had a 10 day window within which he could return it.
The shame in all of this is that there was no easy way to formally get the scammer arrested, or at least get him on the record with the authorities there. Ebay is off the hook on this since they were not used for the transaction, the postal service was lied to, etc.
/. editors by this story.
Had the scamee attempted to go through formal channels he would have probably gotten nowhere. In a system such as this that doesn't work very well, it becomes tempting to take matters into your own hands. The thinking goes: Maybe if we can scam a few more of the scammers the scamming will stop. But it won't. In this case the scammer learned a lesson. He'll do a better job of his web page next time, do more to protect himself against the tax and insurance issues. Only next time he will actually succeed in ripping someone off, and his bad experience this time will be more than made up for.
And, if somethingawful was behind this then I question the legitimacy of the whole thing. I've been to their site to investigate some other shenanigans and all I could see were PR stunts designed to generate page hits and drive traffic to advertisers. Every stunt they pull is shortly followed by finding their links all over the place in posts like yours encouraging people to "check this out". Most people over 14 will be offended by what they find there. I hope they haven't hoodwinked the
I'm a goon, your'e a faggot.
How was the buyer a scammer? I missed that part. All I read was a vague "this is obviously a scam" and the entire article was about his revenge after that.
How do we know this all wasn't perpetrated on a perfectly legitimate buyer?
Seems to me like they prematurely judged an innocent buyer as a scammer, and then broke a bunch of laws to scam him as "revenge."
Help me see what I missed. Where is any evidence at all that the original buyer was a scammer at all?