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.
I loved the photos. This seemed like a big production. Any idea of the status of the "buyer" now?
Edmund White
http://flickr.com/ewwhite
I've often thought of doing something similar, but....
Even if they are being scammed, aren't this person and his/her accomplices committing mail/wire fraud?
I just wouldn't want to be on the other end if the scammer tried to fight back.
Scott
in soviet eBay, YOU scam the scammer!
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
Some of us saw the comment on /. on friday...
5 4505
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=107613&cid=91
Great laugh!!
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.
Or were you looking for a *longer* summary?
"Herflich, prepare the fake banknotes to pay for the painting of the madonna with the big boobies"
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!
You know it's coming: Scammer auctions P-P-P-Powerbook on eBay to cover cost of customs duty.
This story is getting popular enough that it just might work.
I've read the pdf and I still don't quite get it all. What did the professor in Indiana have to do with anything? Was his site merely hacked, or was he in cahoots with the scammer?
Wow, well done.. and some of us saw it three weeks ago as it actually happened on the Something Awful forums.
Is it legal to do this even though he "knew" this was a scam?
Er they did get the van arriving on video, and there was a guy inside when the package was opened, and he was arguing on the phone with the person picking it up, saying there was something wrong. No pictures of his face when he opened it up, unfortunately Another SA Goon checking in, I cant believe this made Slashdot.
TheHustler
http://www.elmarko.org/ - Useless bilge
http://www.asylum-games.co.uk/ - Co-Founder
You know that tl;dr is bannable, right?
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
OS X would work just as good on this box as the real thing...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Except that there's not law in either the UK or USA that says you have to send a REAL powerbook to someone who DIDN'T pay you for it. He pretends to pay, you pretend to send him a real computer.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Personally, I think it's pretty horrible to defraud someone in this manner. While I'm sure this guy in the UK is not totally without blame...
Not totally without blame? Are you in politics? Maybe Rumsfeld could use someone of your talents.
-chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
The best scammer-scam I've ever seen is the infamous The Holy Church of Fish Bread & Wine. If you haven't seen that one, be sure to check it out.
Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two.
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.
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.
I highly doubt our scammer paid his own money for the customs duty. Despite absolutely retarded scam techniques, he did use a buggered box and failed to reveal himself at each step. My instincts tell me he paid the tax with a stolen credit card probably.
So he got made the fool and wasted some of his time. Unless he gets caught and charged with various fradulencies he's just going to do it again to someone less astute.
Here is a HTML version of the PDF file... http://www.mannequin3d.com/powerbook/
http://seanism.com/
Pics of the shop (scroll down, shitty forum...)
So explain to me how he defrauded paypal, ebay, and fedex again? I guess getting money to ship an item is fraud against paypal? Using ebay to try and sell a legitimate item, then getting an offer OUTSIDE ebay is defrauding ebay? Shipping an item to someone is defrauding fedex? He used these services as they were intended, and did not commit fraud against any of them.
It's a HUGE stretch to even consider this "fraud" by the seller in the first place, considering THERE WAS NO REAL TRANSACTION TO BEGIN WITH.
who's the scammer and who's the victim?
Which is even better, because now when that person complains to their credit card company (lets assume Visa), and the Visa goes to investigate the fraud, it will lead them to Fedex. Now Fedex and/or customs knows who the person is, and this guy can go down for credit card fraud!
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
Personally, I think it's pretty horrible to defraud someone in this manner. While I'm sure this guy in the UK is not totally without blame, it seems pretty goddamn stupid to send someone a fraudulent package with a ring binder instead of a laptop and make them pay ~$300 in VAT
It's called street justice, my friend.
This guy wouldn't have gotten nailed for $300 if he hadn't tried to rob someone in the first place.
And as for the publicity, good. Maybe it'll stop the next guy from trying.
I always view calling a policeman or getting the law involved to be a last resort. If you can solve your problems on your own, more power to you. Here, we have crime, and we have just punishment. Bravo, guys.
Weaselmancer
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
What you missed was that he listed an actual PowerBook on ebay - and actually SOLD said PowerBook on eBay to a legitimate buyer. The events of this story all take place SEPERATELY from the eBay sale, outside of eBay. No defrauding of eBay went on here.
As for defrauding PayPal - all he asked for was donations for shipping an item to Great Britain, and said funds were used for that purpose. I think that accusing him of defrauding PayPal is a bit of a stretch - you might make the argument, but I don't think anyone would really swallow it.
The only defrauding that went on here is FedEx - the contents of the package and value were both misstated.
Wrong!
As far as PayPal is concerned, he received funds to ship an item - they have no involvement in what item was involved. Since he shipped an item, he has completed that transaction properly and PayPal has not been defrauded in any manner.
He DID use eBay to sell a real item but ACTUALLY shipped a fake item
Wrong!
He used eBay to advertise the sale of a real item. The "purchaser" in this transaction persued the sale completely outside of eBay. Thus, eBay has not been defrauded in any manner.
He DID use fedex to ship a fraudulent item.
Wrong!
He used FedEx to ship an item. They are not a party to the contents of the box - they were simply the transport medium. They were paid to ship a box, they shipped the box. Thus, FedEx has not been defrauded in any manner.
The only debatable fraudulent actions were between the buyer and the seller directly. But since the bogus escrow site disappeared and the seller was never paid for an actual PowerBook - the buyer has no basis for a fraud claim!
This can be wrapped up as: the buyer used PayPal to pay the seller to ship a box via FedEx to his address. The buyer payed taxes on the declared value of the box's contents - which as was said elsewhere, could be a $2000 piece of contemporary art for all the government cares. That the buyer did not receive an actual Apple Powerbook is due to the fact the buyer never paid for an actual Apple Powerbook! So there was no actual fraud from the buyer's side. The seller still has a claim though - since he was never paid for the piece of $2000 art he shipped in the box!
I AM, therefore I THINK!
Finally, who cares if the intended victim screwed the scammer? What's the shithead going to do, press charges? I'd like to hear that phone call to the police: "Hey, I was trying to defraud this guy out of his $2000+ PowerBook and he sniffed out the scam, turned it around, and made me pay $X in taxes on a 3-ring binder-- now will someone please prosecute him?"
Yes, but three ring binders are useless here in the UK. All the paper has either two holes or four holes in it.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
The keyboard's re-arrangement including: UFAG and LOL ... great stuff ...
The keyboard's re-arrangement including:
UFAG
and
LOL
... great stuff ... thanks for the laughs...
The really sad part of this is that some scammer now has a really excellent work of art. It will probably sell for several million pounds in a couple hundred years. That would be about the price of a cup of coffee.
That bluetooth mouse just cracks me up!
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
So, there goes that silly export fraud claim..
Whether or not the transaction was on or off eBay - he DID list an actual PowerBook - but shipped a "scammer's mockup"
Which was not BOUGHT through eBay. Remember the part about avoiding fees?
He did put ON THE FEDEX slip that it was a PowerBook and insured it FALSELY for $2200. The recipient could have claim potential (regardless of the fake escrow service)
That was the sketchy part, but why would the seller do that, and release his own address and contact details? Won't happen. How does that gurt FedEx? It does not.
He did use Paypal to collect funds to "scam the scammer" - I believe Paypal would not look favorably on this.
He collected funds to ship a real box!! PayPal doesn't care what you collect money for, but there's nothing even questionable about this!
His BEST option was to simply not ship the item if the buyer didn't use the services and payment methods the seller wanted. PERIOD!
Why is that best? I enjoyed the story, and the work of the fake powerbook. If you define "best" as dull then I guess you might have a point. No-One was hurt in this. Two parties lost a little money, and we all got some entertainment - and perhaps, just perhaps, this guy won't try the same thing again!
I'm all for the scammer being scammed - but poetic justice and vigilante justice are not the same.
No they are not - vigilante justice is when the guys showing up at the store have bats instead of cameras. Now do you understand?
Again, there was no physical harm to anyone and both parties lost some money - and not even that much. And the scammer did get SOMETHING for his money.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If customs ever found out about this, would they be very very upset. He knowingly misclaimed the value of the package by a couple thousand dollars. The scammer can claim that he actually wasn't a scammer, right? I mean...maybe he didn't know that the escrow site was a fake and doesn't like to conduct the final transactions through ebay..
chillax137
While this is a great story, did this guy really need to register p-p-p-powerbook.com for it? People register domains for the stupidest reasons.
Also, what's with the 28 page PDF? What's wrong with just HTML? That alone would cut down his bandwidth usage, especially in light of all the publicity this story is getting.
Yeah, I know, -1 Flamebait.
I like my women like my coffee... pale and bitter.
Is it just me, or is this an incomplete prank? I read through the entire PDF and found, to my surprise, that it ended with them waiting for the package to be delivered. Hello? This would be just a little more amusing if there were some sort of punchline. The whole point to this is to get the guy's reaction in some form. So have they waited two weeks without hearing anything more from the scammer? Are there still people staking out the barbershop? WHAT'S GOING ON?
Amusing little prank, but it's just a little prank as long as nobody knows what happened in the end. C'mon, I could send someone a marked-up binder in lieu of a computer anytime I wanted. For those of you who haven't read it yet, don't waste your time. The pictures of the P-P-P-Powerbook itself are worth a giggle but that's pretty much the climax of the whole scenario.
Your school has a stupid policy. However, it does have some useful consequences. Namely, if you're in a fight, hit back and pound on the the other guy to the best of your ability. After all, you're going to get suspended either way. To put your school's policy in persepctive: it's like if this scammer had tried to scam the powerbook out of the seller, the seller had sent him the powerbook, and then the law had punished the SELLER for being defrauded.
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.
I'd just like to point out that unlike this picture real Powerbooks only have one button below the trackpad! This is obviously fake!
Actually, the reason you got a canned response is most likely the fact that this scam was sent to many many people, and eBay (more specifically, PayPal) was dealing with an overwhelming number of inquiries into what it was about. I personally know 4 people (including myself) who recieved that e-mail.
The coordination that existed all under the nose of the target is amazing. They had three operatives just waiting there, and dozens of others investigating the crime and tracing every possible connection.
If just some guys on a message board can do this, what does this say about organized crime? About the police? I can't even imagine the possibilities for the group that stays connected like this.
The Political Programmer
NO MONEY FOR THE POWERBOOK WAS SENT OVER PAYPAL.
I don't know why you cannot understand that key point. All that was sent over PayPal was donations to help him pay for shipping!!!!! It was all donations and had NOTHING AT ALL do to with the powerbook itself!! At no time did the SELLLER USER PAYPAL. RFTA RTFA RTFA.
Let me put this yet another way so that you might comprehend. People sent monery TO the seller - expecting NOTHING IN RETURN, as they were donations!!!!
As for the eBay thing, the seller did not, in fact, do that at all! He listed a REAL powerbook on eBay. He then proceeded to sell a FAKE powerobok to a seller, indepndantly - so no eBay rule was broken!! He may have defrauded a frauder, but eBay had NOTHING TO DO WITH THAT other than being a place where the scammer learned the seller had something they wanted. He only mentioned the dropping fees as a way to hook the scammer on the plan, if you read carefully (I may have mentioned that before a few times).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This kind of vigilante approach is risky, because while you may or may not have guessed correctly that someone is trying to defraud you, sending a piece of plastic instead of a PowerBook is definitely attempted fraud.
For example, if the guy at the other end has a mean streak and some spare cash, he may just send the $2100 and then charge you with fraud. Try explaining to the police and judge that you thought you were being defrauded because some WHOIS information didn't look right to you when the other guy can prove he sent the money to you and you sent him a worthless piece of plastic. Or maybe you are just dealing with a very unprofessional operation, but not necessarily a fraudulent one.
If you believe someone is trying to defraud you, just don't do business with them, contact eBay's fraud department, and maybe go to the police. That's better for everybody involved.
...a B-B-B-Beowulf cluster of those P-P-P-Powerbooks!
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
PDFs take a bloody long time to display (unless you have a top of the line 'puter and a broadband connection, it takes as long to load a PDF as it does to load Photoshop).
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Wow! Great work, man! We're all proud of you for putting a URL into a form! We're lucky you were there, or who knows what would have happened!!!
God damned Farker.
He wasn't arguing on the phone. He was talking to the barbershop owner. I think you read Rhig's posting of the events wrong. He heard the barber on the phone. Then, after, he heard the eastern european reciever of the package talking to the barber about his packages.
if the guy at the other end has a mean streak and some spare cash, he may just send the $2100 and then charge you with fraud.
Any fraud claim done in this way would be easily shot down. Via tracking numbers, postmarks and dated receipts it would be possible for the seller to prove that he shipped the item and it was received by the "buyer" before the "buyer" made payment. IANAL, but if the "buyer" sent payment after knowing he had been sent a jacked-up 3-ring binder, I'd say that constitutes implicit acceptance of/satisfaction with the item-- he'd be screwing himself.
And if he had $2100 in spare cash laying around that he could send to someone to try to nail them for fraud, why not just spend it on a brand new PowerBook from Apple and avoid the effort of trying to fuck someone on eBay?
This is a great example of turning the tables on a scammer. If more people had the intelligence and creatvity to do this sort of thing, we could really put a dent in the activites of on-line crooks.
The way I see it, the scammer got what he deserved and you've really got to scrape the bottom of the barrel of technicalities to find something that the seller did that was "illegal".
IANAL, but the only thing "illegal" that was done by the seller was mis-stating the value of the item on the customs form. And even that could be debated. If I paint a picture and declare that it's worth $10,000, who is to say that it's not?
1, Ebay was not defrauded. The seller sold the real Powerbook to a legitimate buyer on Ebay. Ebay got paid.
2, Fedex was not defruaded. They got their $80 for shipping the package.
3, Paypal was not defrauded. Every day, thousands of people use Paypal to collect donations for various things. The seller said he needed money to cover the cost of shipping a package and that's exactly what he used the money for.
4, The government was not defrauded. They got paid their customs duties when the scammer picked up his package.
5, The P-P-Powerbook seller never received a penny from the buyer (the attempted scammer).
He didn't insure it. The $2,000 price was to jack up the VAT that the scammer had to pay.
So, technically he did mistate the value of the package to UK customs, but he _overstated_ the value, giving UK customs more money than they diserved. I don't think they'll be upset by getting too much money.
Not to mention it may be worded in the law that so that understating the value is illegal, but overstating the value is not.
We're sorry. The scammers that were sent to scam the scammers are, themselves, scammers.
The ______ Agenda
I could not afford one from Apple, nor auction sites, so I bought a $4USD white plastic notebook hat I can put papers into and got some markers and used an old keyboard keycaps and an old MS-Mouse and made my own Powerbook. L@@K, it works 100%, runs OSX as well. Only downside is I am now being sued by Apple for making a Powerbook clone without their permission. ;)
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
My school had a policy that anyone involved in a fight/assault was suspended, even if you didn't hit back you were gone. And yes, that was enforced. I got a 3 day vacation for being on the receiving end once.
This sounds very, very wrong. If you do not fight back, it isn't a fight; it's assault. My parents were schoolteachers and one thing I had to learn was if/when someone actually picked a fight with me on school property, I had to put my hands behind my back and take it to avoid suspension. The victim had to be completely passive. It wasn't fair, but that was sufficient proof of assault rather than fighting.
I doubt this policy would stand up to due process standards. By the same logic, a girl who is sexually assaulted wouldn't a victim, but a "willing participant in conscentual behavior". A ludicrous notion indeed.
Considering my parents and their friends and families have been in education a very long time, and have never seen a policy where assault was classified as "fighting". Either your school policy was blatantly illegal, or you aren't remembering/telling things the way they actually were.
Wow! What are your women like?
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
I sold my iBook on eBay a few weeks ago and got an email from the same scammer asking me if I wanted to sell it off eBay for well above the market price, with two day shipping to the UK. Sounded funny from the start, but the fake escrow site was the clincher. Glad he's had his comeuppance.
Copies of emails here if anyone's interested.
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.
> It's a scam and everyone knows it.
It would be good closure to know whether the actions our hero took, constitute a crime. It would be a completely separate crime. The original fraud might be a mitigating factor, or it might not. It would suck to have to explain to the court why you told customs that your $2.50 worth of stuff was a $2000.00 computer. It would REALLY suck if you weren't allowed to tell the jury about the supposed scammer, but still had to explain what you did.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
My school had a policy that anyone involved in a fight/assault was suspended, even if you didn't hit back you were gone. And yes, that was enforced. I got a 3 day vacation for being on the receiving end once.
Although unfortunately common, this sort of policy reflects a fundamental contempt for the concept of justice, and sets a terrible example for students. What it reflects is a fundamental laziness and irresponsibility on the part of the administration. They take the easy course of punishing the innocent rather than going to the trouble of investigating the situation. It gives great power to bullies, who are able to force the suspension of an innocent student by attacking him. Although the intent is to discourage fighting, it tends to make fights worse, because once a fight begins, you have nothing to lose by retalliating. It would be terribly unfortunate if you happened to have a sharpened pencil in your hand when you were attacked. Somebody who started a fight with you could suffer a horrible accident...
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
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