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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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pics of the shop (scroll down, shitty forum...)
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 ... 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..
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.
Why would UK customs be upset? More money for the UK piggy bank.
This is someone getting their just desserts, and in a damn funny way too. Just as good as sending the box, marking it "MUST BE CHECKED BY CUSTOMS" and sticking a polythene bag of flour in there.
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
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
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.
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).
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.
Wow! What are your women like?
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
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