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Paypal Orders Buyer of Violin To Destroy It For a Refund
An anonymous reader writes "Erica was once the owner of an old violin that had survived through WWII, and decided to sell it on Ebay for $2500. The person who bought it decided it was a counterfeit and wanted his money back. Paypal decided to honor the request for a refund on the condition that the buyer destroy the violin and provided photographic evidence of the destruction. Couldn't he have just returned it?" Sounds like a hoax to me, but I guess it's possible.
Comply with PayPal's shipping requests in a timely manner.
For SNAD Claims, PayPal may require you to ship the item back to the seller - or to PayPal - or to a third party at your expense, and to provide proof of delivery. Please take reasonable precautions in re-packing the item to reduce the risk of damage to the item during transit. PayPal may also require you to destroy the item and to provide evidence of its destruction.
For transactions that total less than USD $250 (or local currency equivalent), proof of delivery is confirmation that can be viewed online and includes: recipient's (seller's) address, showing at least city, postal code, state, or country (or equivalent), delivery date, and the URL to the shipping company's web site if you've selected "Other" in the shipping drop down menu. For transactions that total USD $250 or more, you must get signature confirmation of the delivery.
Emphasis mine. Note, I found this at the original article over at Regretsy along with a picture for those of you who are lazy.
..."
Well, at least everyone involved has a crazy story to tell: "Gather 'round children and let me tell you about the time I had to destroy a hundred year old violin in a timely manner. FuhrerMarks had instructed me -- back then they were known as 'PayPal' -- to destroy the violin after a dispute about its label
My work here is dung.
If it's a fake, there's no real value and hence not worth to return.
I had to destroy paintings and photographs damaged during shipping as well in the past to get replacement.
Wasting money to send waste around the country is nuts.
Why is this news? Is that the usual PayPal-Foes?
They have more clients than all the big US banks together, get used to it, they won't go away, no matter how many such boring anecdotes are posted.
Hey PayPal, ever heard of Photoshop?
1. But $100 violin, then claim it's a fake
2. Buy $5 violin, smash it up, send photo to PayPal
3. Profit!
Whats to stop the person making the claim from popping out to a thrift shop, buying an old educational violin for peanuts (or lashing out a slightly larger sum on a cheap Chinese violin), and "destroying" that? For a $2500 refund, I'm surprised thay don't require the whole, unbroken violin to be returned to PayPal.
Sure, ya, i destroyed the original.. Ya.. see here in this picture..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
There is a site called "regretsy.com"... And here I was thinking I would get some work done this afternoon. Oh shit, they have a sister site called "uhpinions", too?
I sold a 24-port Fax board on eBay via PayPal when I decommissioned our internal fax server and went to an outsourced model about 3 years ago. The purchaser filed a claim with PayPal and said they could not get it to work. I asked for the item to be returned and I would refund. Instead PayPal reversed the money without them returning the product. I am not sure if they required them to destroy it but I lost the money and the fax board and it was a working device when it shipped. I have not sold on eBay or used PayPal as a seller since.
Hell, I'm surprised that PayPal didn't just ask for it to be shipped to them, and then turn around and sell it for another $2500.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
This policy probably stems from modern counterfeit goods such as Rolex/Coach or whatever else knockoffs of expensive products are floating around. And it's bad enough there, let alone antiques, since companies of modern goods have a good incentive to suppress any secondhand market of their own products and some will flag listings as counterfeit just for the sake of it.
But I have relatives in the antique business and in certain areas, you can really ask 10 experts and get 10 different opinions. Really. Or appraisers tell you different opinions based on what you pay and want to hear or their own agendas (if you didn't buy it from them, it becomes more suspect in some cases, petty politics like that, etc.)
But that is besides the point. Here, Paypal broke the piece, they should buy it, at full price. It's not their place to determine what's fake or not. Even if it was, they are not law enforcement, they are acting as self-appointed vigilantes. Return shipping in the condition it was sent should be a requirement. And moreso, if they determine the seller is out their to sell counterfeit goods or defraud someone, they should shut down the account and forward evidence to the proper authorities.
I hope the lady sues them and gets extra damages.
My work here is dung.
She is screwed. I am sure the case would win agents PayPal as you could say they didn't have the technical expertise to verify it was fake. IANAL, but I cannot believe a judge in small clams court would deny that Paypal was stupid in this case.
I am curious, any lawyers out there familiar with small clams? Would you sue the buyer, who lives out of country, because he is stupid and doesn't know a real from a fake or Paypal who ordered the destruction of the violin? If you do sue Paypal, do you just go to your local court for it, it doesn't seem like they would bother to send anyone there as it just be cheaper to pay her off.
It all could be bogus though. Someone paying 2500 for a violin, even an amateur, might understand something "Made in Japan" doesn't make it 100 years old.
This sounds like the Law astroturfing all-over the public domain. You don't have a COUNTERFEIT musical instrument: if it plays a note to any precision, then it is a true viable instrument. Such OPERATION is the motivation of one's work ethic in assembling and designing tools as well. Everyone knows was a violin could look like, but there is more than one maker and each maker has plenty of models to derive their master design from.
For anyone to claim a violin as being counterfeit is nothing more than a monopolising champertain. This wasn't a WWII violin and it wasn't Beethoven's violin: it was a simply fucking violin made somehwere around 60 or more years ago. It was most-likely made by hand and expected to look undistinguished from other violins insofar as being a capable instrument. Full workmanship is not a counterfeit, but this is Soviet Earth Plantation of ChiMexica so what do I know.
I build my own Violin from broken (disassembled junk) parts that consisted of string winds on a fret board across a neck to a hollow bowl and it was derived from string drums that I removed from a Fender guitar: keep in mind that because I used broken-down parts from name-brand instruments, it doesn't make my assembly into a Fender violin. Without title to the prior assembly, my next assembly is titled proper in common law from it's inherinet Documentation to my BIll of Exchange for how I convey the idea with those parts. Likewise, if I have a pipe and a 10-gauge brace bore and a wooden butt then I don't call it a Shotgun when it's BROKEN and I explicitely don't call it a Remington's Shotgun if there are CORRECTIONS (ahhem, not modifications mmkay) that deviate to discharge it's tenancy to the original title. Likewise, I don't call it a Sawed-off shotgun when it's a known fact that the pipe was extruded to the full length of 5 inches to be tailored for my use as a LARGE trumpet-barreled shot pistol.
All these governments are securing their existance at a time when efficiency deems them obsolete amidst such as the people reclaiming their lives and property without the limited liability clauses of the monopolist executive administrative bodies in municipal government regulative positions of trust. SO-far to this day, Government has only used tax-money for it's pay-roll and nowhere in mediating disputes where lacks a Corpus Delecti.
The same is said about so-called Counterfeiters whose product exceedd the quality of the neighboring companies who they've been accused of counterfeiting despite quality proving otherwise. Counterfeits are not distinguishable, because they are the same. The public domain is being infringed by Regulators that have no office but by implied consent.
It's the world's smallest violin, playing just for... DAMMIT, PAYPAL!
Smashing idea! Simply smashing!
According to some people, the violin should have been sent back instead.
1. Buy $2500 violin, then claim it's a fake.
2. Buy a $100 fake violin, return it instead of the real one.
3. Profit!
Only possible option would be for Paypal to let an independant expert verify the violin's authenticity, then let the losing party pay for the expert.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
FTA: "It is beyond me why PayPal simply didn't have the violin returned to me."
It is beyond me why anyone uses PayPal. I feel genuinely sorry for the seller, but then again, caveat emptor. It's not as though there aren't thousands of well-publicized horror stories about these fuckwit douchebags - if you need a citation, just Google "paypal sucks" and check out a few of the 189,000 results. If PayPal were the last financial institution on earth I'd be keeping my money in my mattress.
It's said that we get the government we deserve - I guess that applies to companies as well. If people would just stop using PayPal then they'd change their ways or go out of business. But I guess expecting the majority of people to get their heads out of their asses, do a little research, and take a principled stand on something is asking too much.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NAkIUToW5Q
That's what you get for dealing with Paypal.
Maybe one day people will learn.
Were this just an isolated incident, I would be screaming hoax with the best of you; however, given PayPal's handling of a recent charity case, where a group had their account suspended after trying to raise money to buy presents for poor children, I'm not so sure. Quote PayPal's support: "You can use the donate button to raise money for a sick cat, but not poor people."
http://www.regretsy.com/2011/12/05/cats-1-kids-0/
From listening to other merchants, turns out this is a known scam. Buyers take advantage of PayPal's policy of 'buyer is always right' and end up with both the money and the item, which they often turn around and resell. There have also been cases of people buying stuff, returning for a refund, and shipping back something else of much less value... with again PayPal supporting the buyer.
Paypal is not regulated like banks are, in the US.
Paypal makes it way too easy for a buyer to rip off a seller.
Why would you use PayPal after knowing the two facts
above ? The answer is that you'd use it because you
are willing to ignore good reasons to avoid it, in which case
you deserve whatever you get.
The problem in any case is, if the buyer swaps the violin, how do you prove the buy swapped it, or didn't?
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Apparently years ago they used to do just that.. but now that they have a stranglehold on eBay they have dropped such complexity for a simpler system that screws merchants over pretty badly.
My Parents bought some ipods off of Ebay, I knew by looking at them they were fake and they also didn't work. My dad went through PayPal so they reimbursed him, but they did have him destroy the fake iPods and in the process. With something like this, I think it is viable to to know counterfeit and real, but with something like an antique, I would have said just return it or at least have it sent to an expert.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
Here's an old 2-man scam for you.
The two of you are eating at a restaurant, separately. The first of you is dressed decently--not super well, but not shabby-- and has an old-looking violin. Personally, I make it a point of pride never to spend more than $10 on the violin. Anyways, after the meal, lament that you've forgotten your wallet, but here, hold onto my violin as collateral, and I'll be back in an hour.
After you leave, the second fellow pulls aside the waiter and asks to inspect the violin. He then declares that this is a genuine so-and-so, worth thousands, and you'd be ever-so-interested in buying it and when did the violinist say he'd return? Oh no! I can't wait that long, I've a plane to catch. Here, give the man my card and let him know that I'm very interested in his violin.
When the first person returns, the waiter in all likelihood will offer whatever he can scrounge up, perhaps a few hundred dollars, for the violin, keeping the other gentleman's offer to himself. The worst case scenario, the waiter simply passes the card along and you're out no more than the cost of lunch.
(Kudos if you know where this is from)
that PayPal sucks
As someone who sells thousands of dollars worth of merchandise a month, with processing going through Paypal, I can't emphasis enough how much I want to move away from those bastards. Already talking to other processors to get the hell away from Paypal. Can't wait...
PayPal isn't in the business of being a reseller. It's far more profitable to be just the middle man holding all the money.
What idiot would pay $2500 for a violin online without hearing it. For that amount of money I'd have to have physically inspected it first.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
And to play devil's advocate, the seller could have just as easily authenticated the $2500 violin and then shipped the buyer a $100 fake.
Long signatures suck.
Zombieland, the girls did it with a ring in the gas station.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
You have it backwards:
(1) Buy $5 violin.
(2) Fraudulently advertise that it survived WWII, and sell it for $2500.
(3) Piss and moan when accused of fraud and the violin is destroyed buy mark at request of PayPal.
(4) Out $5, but not in jail.
(5) Deal with it.
If it is true it is possible that the conversation went something like this;
Buyer: the seller sent me bogus merchandise and I want a refund.
PP: Send it back and provide proof of reciept and we will refund the money.
Buyer: No, I do not want to aid in the duping of the next unsuspecting buyer by sending the item back.
PP; We can not allow you to keep both the item and the refund so the only option would be for you to destroy the item, provide proof and we will refund.
I am not saying this is right but is within the TOS.
The seller needs a Canadian court to acknowledge the contract that was made when the item was sold on ebay. Then the seller can claim his payment, which is due.
... and there are those "f-holes" ...
but photographic evidence?
Oh.. sorry.
the bass bar shape has changed, the neck has been lengthened, the fingerboard has been lengthened, the neck has been mortised, the tailpiece, bridge, pegs, have had their shape changed. It doesn't even have original catgut strings! Antonio Stradivari wouldn't recognize this. Burn it, so that others may not have it, either.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
The pendulum of balance has been swinging wildly back and forth between buyer and seller at ebay. It wasn't too long ago that sellers were routinely screwing over buyers and leaving scathing negative feedback if they tried to get any resolution. (a buyer with ~25 feedback gets hurt a lot more than a seller with 10,000 feedback when each leaves the other a negative, and they knew it) That's why sellers can't leave buyers negative feedback anymore - too much abuse. I personally got burnt by a seller on two occasions there before they started adjusting things. (one cost me $156 - wound up with no product and no cash, PLUS a negative feedback, with a comment that made me look like the bad guy)
In a local sale, the seller is usually at a disadvantage - in most cases returning items is very easy, so much so that for common issues sellers have to specifically exclude returns due to abuse - like water pumps and generators in times of flooding and ice storms. Lots of abuse of buy-use-return abuse on tools too. A properly working buyer/seller system doesn't appear "balanced and fair" from a casual glance, it appears to be tilted toward the buyer. But in reality, that's where fairness lives.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I think it would be a good idea to sue Ebay Canada/PayPal Canada in small claims court.
The courts have already decided http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/fct/doc/2007/2007fc930/2007fc930.html that EBay Canada is a distinct legal entity. It would be interesting to have them show up in court to explain themselves. They would likely lose, and would definitely be out of pocket more that $2.5K just to put in an appearance.
Just because their dispute resolution policy says that they "MAY ask for destruction" does not defend them that they have applied this policy reasonably. The seller could reasonably obtain a judgment that the application of that policy was improper, in this instance, and that EBay has to cough up the $2.5K.
No, it's from Neil Gaiman's American Gods
No sig for the moment.
It's Paypal's job to move money. That's it. It's neither their job nor their right to tell people to destroy goods or to refuse to honor a payment to wikileaks or anything else of that nature. They are going down the same path that health insurance companies were somehow allowed to go down, and they need a serious dose of financial damage in the form of boycotts or disruptive alternative payment systems to put them in their place.
Cuz that one guy has a buddy who's an expert in violins...
What idiot would pay $2500 for a violin online without hearing it. For that amount of money I'd have to have physically inspected it first.
The kind that is scamming the seller?
I bet you think Neil Gaiman came up with the concept of Gods, too.
The instrument repair shop where my wife works does appraisals for free. I imagine there are plenty of luthiers who could look at the violin and let you know in about 5 minutes (or less) if it was a $2500 violin or not.
Or you could knowingly buy a fake violin for $1, 000,000 if you want to launder some money. The possibilities for crime on eBay are almost limitless!
True, and eBay still has many scammer sellers on it (though often the scamming has moved up and is sellers scamming resellers)... but I think the big thing here is they do not even seem to have a resolution process... PayPal is infamous for 'we internally decided X, you have no recourse, we legally own your money, you are not getting it back'. Their whole model is crummy.
Given the "or didn't" at the end, that really isn't devil's advocate.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Sounds more like a fiddle to me.
PayPal may also require you to destroy the item and to provide evidence of its destruction.
This sounds like a job for Pete Townsend.
Whenever humanly possible I mark my items with a blacklight pen. I don't say that in the listing.
Then if someone wants to return it and get a refund, no problem. Once I receive it in the same condition I sent it AND I verify it with that mark I'll gladly refund.
Funny how people suddenly don't want their refund when they find out I've put some kind of identifier on it that they can't duplicate.
Hey, this isn't a violin! It's a banjo with some molding tacked on! FAKE!
(a buyer with ~25 feedback gets hurt a lot more than a seller with 10,000 feedback when each leaves the other a negative, and they knew it)
eBay's whole feedback system is a circle jerk anyway. You give me good feedback and I'll give you good feedback. It's designed to bury negative feedback in positive feedback. Basically, most buyers don't care what good feedback a seller gets. Maybe neutral, but you want to see what kind of negatives a seller has. A much better system would be showing neutrals and negatives but only counting positives. Then a prospective buyer could see what neutral/negative feedback was received over how many successful/positive auctions. Currently you have to wade through thousands of A+++++++++++++++++++++ useless feedback to see how a seller handles an auction where both parties weren't happy. And if you were going to display ANY positive feedback, it would be from buyers who initially posted neutral/negative and choose to change it to positive after resolution.
Another day, another update to a Google android app.
In a double-blind test, even experienced violinists and violin makers cannot reliably identify the sound of a Stradivarius over a newly-made violin.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/01/02/violinists-can%E2%80%99t-tell-the-difference-between-stradivarius-violins-and-new-ones/
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
The entire post (aside from the parenthetical comment at the end) was a direct quote from American Gods.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
OT trivia: PayPal is infamous for 'we internally decided X
coincidentally, X.COM is PayPal!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
That doesn't really work, as the point of laundering money isn't to just give it away, but to exchange it for something that can eventually be reconverted back into cash for as as close to [or more than] the original amount.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
So? That merely shows that Stradivarius violins really aren't specially wonderful sounding and throws into question their actual worth in terms of performing value. It says nothing about whether they can examine the thing and identify that it is indeed a Stradivarius as opposed to one made by some other guy.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Where are you getting a $100, much less $5, violin? I would be very interested to hear this. Just what do you suppose the average violin costs?
Uh, that's a good price for just about any decent-quality instrument, used or not. The seller probably could have got a lot more for it if they had done their homework.
I play the euphonium -- if I found a B&H Imperial or a Besson Sovereign for that price, I'd use Buy it Now.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
The hand crafting of fine violins often involves a master, journeymen and apprentices. Once crafted and approved the master applies his label to the instrument but the violin may have been made by a journeyman to the master's standards. Journeymen can become masters in their own right and apprentices become journeymen. It's possible for one shop to have several journeymen of varying experience over the years. After the instrument is sold and used it can require service. The bridges get broken, the peg holes wear, the neck might have to be reset so additional luthiers may have worked on the instrument. This is one way that labels can end up being disputed.
Yet somehow they can identify antique furniture without playing it. It is more than just sound to prove provenance.
A buyer who gets negative feedback just dumps his account and starts a new one. Sellers don't demand that buyers have extensive histories before they'll take the money. A seller who gets negative feedback is stuck. He needs his history, so buyers know he's a legitimate seller, but those black marks really hurt hium.
Since when did people have the right to claim foul and not send it back?
Man I'd love to see that in retail stores. Yea, I bought this 3000$ laptop. It didn't work, I'll get you photos of it being destroyed. You're just out a 3000g laptop tho.
Knowing this, paypal just hit my shit list. I'm not interested in having things stolen and paypal supporting the thief. Not only refunding it, which means the sale is incomplete, this means that they are /no/ longer the owner. Paypal just authorized someone to destroy my personal property? I don't think so.
I thought the point of money laundering was to conceal the source of or legitimize undisclosed money?
If I buy a fake violin for $1,000,000 the police are still going to say "Whoa whoa whoa there, where the hell did you get a million dollars?"
Long signatures suck.
I am not a lawyer, but a few rules of thumb:
In any legal dispute, the person that you usually take to court is the person that you have a direct relationship with. In this case, the buyer gave the money to PayPal and PayPal then did not give it to the seller, having agreed to, or took back the money for spurious reasons. PayPal should therefore be taken to court.
Filing in a small claims court is usually very cheap and does not require a lawyer. The purpose of these courts is to allow low-value disputes to be resolved without involving the full legal process. File near you and PayPal has to send someone to your local court if they wish to defend it. If they don't defend then the judge or magistrate will rule based purely on your testimony.
Small claims courts do not usually expect either party to be a lawyer (taking a lawyer to a small claims court can often prejudice the judge or magistrate against you) and are not expected to have detailed legal knowledge. They are simply expected to state their grievance and allow the judge to decide what statue and common law is applicable. In this case, the buyer would state that, as a result of PayPal's actions, they do not have the violin worth $2,500, nor do they have the money, and so they have lost $2,500. The judge would then decide whether PayPal had acted correctly in this case.
Once you have a judgement, if PayPal refuses to pay then you can usually just hand it over to a collections agency. They will add something on top and require PayPal to pay the collections fee as well as the total amount of the judgement. If they still don't pay, then they will arrange to have PayPal assets confiscated and sold until the amount is reached.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
destroy an irreplaceable piece of history
Well, it is quite replaceable, just buy a violin and wait. Voila, an old violin. Personally I don't really see why anything old has an excessive value beyond its use.
lqtms
There's a lesson here: Don't use Paypal to sell any expensive items. If you're selling a bunch of things that are $10, then if you have a problem with some jerk-off buyer, it's no big loss. Plus, scamming buyers probably won't bother to scam you anyway, since they're not going to profit very much by scamming you out of a $10 item. If you're selling something that costs thousands at quantity 1, then use a different service; either have the buyer send a cashier's check, or set up a merchant account with Visa/MC (obviously not practical if you're only selling one expensive item, but if you have a business selling lots of expensive items it'll be feasible), or find a different service such as Google Payments.
Actually in this article it was a double-blind test, and not even the players could tell which was which. Most of them when asked which of the violins they'd take home, chose one that had been manufactured three days before.
I guess the point is a $2500 violin could easily sound just the same as a $100 violin. With that much money on the line . . . .
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
It's the seller of the violin, not the buyer, that needs their money laundered. Presume that you, the buyer of the violin, is a rich drug dealer who bought $1 million in cocaine from a drug supplying cartel. Since you're a bit short of untraceable cash at the moment, and for some reason your cartel wants to legitimize their income and pay capital gains taxes on it, they sell you an "authentic" million dollar violin. You pay the money, get a crap violin and the drugs.
This assumes that your $1 million in cash had already been laundered, but needed to be used for a criminal purpose. If you had $1 million in untraceable dirty cash, you could have just bought your drugs with that cash and left the seller to launder his own money.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Same thing happened here. I bought a "used" iPod Nano off eBay for a good price, which had normal looking pictures of a genuine model taken out of the box. When it came in the mail... it was a different color, quite a bit larger, and when I turned it on a horribly pixelated screen showed the Apple logo and the text "HELLO" below it. Right.
I disputed the payment and got my refund from Paypal, and they asked that I destroy the iPod clone and take pictures. I proceeded to clamp it in my bench vise and saw it in half with a hacksaw, while my girlfriend took pictures of the process. Well, I struck the battery with the hacksaw - smoke and fire ensued. Once it died down and I had aired the smoke out of my basement, I finished sawing the now burnt and discolored iPod clone in half.
I'm pretty sure those pictures are thumbtacked to someone's cubicle wall at Paypal now.
This crap makes me very happy I play brass instruments. Forgeries of vintage trumpets like early Martin Committees and Olds Recordings are difficult to make. The "fake" horns on eBay are mostly bogus Chinese sound-a-like marques ("Selman" instead of "Selmer") or amusingly bad Indian replicas of vintage cornets that have misspelled or conflicting markings ("Boosey" and "Bessons" marked on the same instrument). Unfortunately, the few suckers for these aren't professional musicians, but often ignorant parents who are trying to get something playable for their kids to start on.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Mis-labelling in the violin world is quite common. Both sellers and buyers are aware of this. There are some very nice violins falsely labeled as Strads, for example. If the seller correctly presented the provenance ("I have had this violin since I inherited it from my relative, who held it from the 1930s through the war"), and correctly presented the label ("there is a label which states XXX") I don't see either party has a ground for complaint. Once the violin is destroyed, the seller has great claims for destruction of property - it's not worthless.
Apparently the violin was already authenticated.
Or.. the buyer (the only one getting screwed) hires the expert, pays him and then takes the seller to court /arbitration for value + expert fees. Paypal should have nothing to do in an authenticity dispute IMHO. They are just a money service.
Not a direct quote, done from memory, but yes, American Gods. The key thing here, in my mind, is the point of pride. That, if nothing else, is unique to Gaiman's anecdote.
This is about brains. It takes brains and experience for a rep to decide how to resolve an issue. Paypal leans on policy to lessen its dependence on brains.
I don't remember PayPal having a "buyer is always right" policy. Of all the problems I've reported to PayPay, the response has always been a very slow investigation, sometimes culminating in "We have found out that you are in the right. We are able to recover $0.00, which we now return to you." Then I report the situation to my credit card, which refunds my money. Then PayPal sends me a "We wish you would have contacted us first about your dispute" letter.
I suppose in all that they nominally acknowledge that I'm right, but it's not exactly a vindication you can take to the bank, if you know what I mean.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Meh, Zombieland was better.
It wouldn't matter.
PayPal had the receiver destroy the item, then reversed the charges. Its not like you actually have any say in the matter.
There is one key thing that people tend to forget when these kinds of test results come out. As the wood in the violin ages its sound will change. After about 300 years or so (the average age of a Strad) the sound won't change much. With a new violin (average cost for a handmade one by an expert lutier being around $20,000) you have no way of knowing how the sound will change as it ages. Sure it might sound good today, but what happens in 10 years as the wood ages? There are violins made by Stradivarius that don't sound good because the wood didn't age well, and he was known to experiment with his instrument design a bit (for example the Chanot-Chardon Stradivarius violin is guitar shaped). That same problem could happen to a modern made violin leaving the musician out the price of a small car and a nearly worthless instrument. Safer to buy an older instrument that has had time to age.
And on another note chances are if anyone buys a $100 violin they've bought a cheap poorly setup piece of junk that is almost unplayable.
Hard to say about "average" - but I'd guess that $100 isn't far off. The world is filled with really terrible newly manufactured violins. They're dirt cheap. Not at all pleasant to play, but they're fine as decorations if you're into that sort of thing. You're more likely to find them at flea markets than music stores though.
I have the sudden urge to start buying antiques on Ebay, declaring them fakes, and having them destroyed for a full refund. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Then I post pictures of the destroyed treasures on the internet. Its like snuff films for antiquities dealers.
This policy makes sense for about five seconds--"Hey, instead of giving a counterfeit item back to a seller so they can just scam someone else with it, destroy it!"--until you think about about a) the possibility of mistakes and b) the potential for abuse. At that point you say "Oh, right, that's stupid" and no one ever speaks of it again. PayPal is RETARDED for keeping it in place.
Sadly, eBay is still a HUGE (the hugest?) market for many kinds of goods, and they're tied in with PayPal, so it's a chance you take when you do business there. Just as you shouldn't take anything rafting that you aren't willing to lose at the bottom of a river forever, you probably shouldn't sell anything on eBay that you're not willing to take a loss on.
But yeah... this particular incident totally sucks. There should never be any kind of punishment without some kind of proof. No claim of any kind should ever result in automatic long-term or permanent anything, just like with DMCA takedown notices.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Ah, I didn't check, but the point of pride was what made me think it was a direct quote.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You still want to do a visual inspection on anything or have a third party do it. I bought a C&R rifle from a guy in AZ and a friend who lived nearby looked at it and confirmed it's legit and that it was in good shape. Same applies for a guitar since you can easily hide cracks in the neck with a bit of nail polish for a photo or just about any kind of damage that isn't 100% obvious.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
Chinese sound-a-like marques ("Selman" instead of "Selmer")
Are they any good at all?
Unfortunately, the few suckers for these aren't professional musicians, but often ignorant parents who are trying to get something playable for their kids to start on.
I've been interested for a while to learn the basset horns but even a used one is about eight grand. That's in the cost territory where I have to consider if I could take a month off of work and make one for less money (i.e. not gotta happen).
Basically an $8000 entry-level instrument means I'm not going to learn it.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
someone used paypal with a significant amount of money and got royally screwed by them, with direct verbal instructions by them to boot.
Why should I ever use paypal? Please. Convince me at $20, or $2000.
1. Buy $2500 violin, then claim it's a fake.
2. Buy a $100 fake violin.
4. Buy lotto ticket.
5. Win lotto.
6. Profit with TWO violins!
Sounds like a variation from Neil Gaiman's American God's :-) Read the next 4-5 pages starting here to get more :-)
http://readr.ru/neil-gaiman-american-gods.html?page=79#
Please forgive the russian, but the text is in English.
If you look up Bourguignon Maurice violin, you will see they are considered to be fine and collectable instruments with a value of perhaps $20,000.00 .
Idiotic doesn't even begin to describe this.
so then buy a new violin every few years if it starts not sounding right, and you still saved money over buying that Strad
I have had no problem with PayPal when I was on the buying side. When I was on the selling side, things haven't been so great and the web is full of horror stories.
In my mind I see many more buyers than sellers and PayPal seems to be going after having/keeping that critical mass of users and counting on sellers having to use their services if they want to reach out to buyers. Much like Facebook and Twitter are worthless if your friends/relatives aren't using it and it's almost required for you to be there if all of them are too (otherwise you start to miss stupid cat pictures).
So PayPal offers buyers much more risk protection than it does for sellers (which are fewer individuals than buyers).
The same goes for credit cards. Buyers love them but I've met very few business people who don't have complaints about MasterCard, Visa, etc. They don't have much option though: buyers rarely work in their stores with real cash, everyone wants to use the plastic cards and checks are just too insecure to accept.
All of this calls for more... regulation? I don't know but the horror stories seem to be getting worse as much as PayPal tries to impose crazy rules on everybody. I saw crazy here because they seem to be trying to enforce a least common denominator on all the World, that is, they choose the most strict rules in some country and enforce that on their whole service when it's clear that such things don't apply everywhere.
As it's evident, PayPal is also trying to protect itself from lawsuits but it might be getting exactly the opposite result in the near future.
none
I hope this subthread of the conversation gets modded up.
Mail fraud is a big deal, and insurance would cover you at least the cost of the loss. I like the plan for videotaping the packaging. I'm not sure how one would handle the time between packaging and handoff to the post office, but it certainly sounds like a way to ensure that your Valuable Thing at least doesn't get away from you without you getting compensated. (And, fraudsters are at much greater risk.)
On eBay, the seller and the buyer could be the same person.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
This scam is also described in the song "Can't Con an Honest John" by The Streets, where it takes place in a bar using a dog instead of a violin. Don't know if he got it from Gaiman, or if it is older than that, but I'm guessing the latter.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
Yet somehow they can identify antique furniture without playing it. It is more than just sound to prove provenance.
Ah, the fools! I always play the sofa and end cushions before making a purchase. Always, I tell you!
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
How can they order the destruction of anything? They are simply a broker or "go between" between two parties. PayPal does not own the item in question. Any disputes are between the buyer and the seller.
Zombieland, the girls did it with a ring in the gas station.
Two girls, one ring?
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Don't know where it's from, but the song "You can't con an honest John" by The Streets suggests a dog and a pub.
"As I have come to realize, running the beats is just getting people's confidence.
This scam only works 'cos that man thinks he's working this scam"
And what is good, Phaedrus, And what is not good... Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
I've used ebay to successfully bid on items over $1000. BUT, I'd never trust paypal for that kind of money. What I did was contract for payment by certified check upon local delivery (BEFORE bidding), and comp the seller $25 for the inconvenience to deliver the item. Worked out great for both of us.
The Streets does a version of this in song on the album 'Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living'-- Can't Con An Honest Jon
A version of this also happens in series one or two of 'Only Fools and Horses'
It's from an O. Henry story. Or, at least, O. Henry wrote a story about just such a scam, involving a painting. What WAS the title? Google, click, click. Nothing. Where's my dead-tree copy? Aha. "Babes in the Jungle."
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Not always. I had a DVD set of an overseas series which turned out to be an obvious bootleg. Subtitle quality ranged from awesome to incomprehensible between episodes, and on some you could even see the moving scan-line where it was copied from a poorly tracked casette (or via a crappy coax cable). This from a seller that guaranteed legit items.
Paypal's response: Find somebody who can verify for us that it's fake and will send a signed letter. After checking all the local video stores, nobody was willing to do so, or at least not for significantly > cost of item.
In the end I couldn't get it done by the time the dispute was up. I got stuck with a counterfeit, and the seller got to keep my money.
Hi -
To me, that is not too different than the "glim scam" Nathaniel West described a version of it using a glass eyeball in his 1930's novel "A Cool Million"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_confidence_tricks
- TWR
Paypal seems to screw the sellers almost all the time, not the buyers (as seen in TFA). So you're probably fairly safe buying a $1k item with Paypal, but the seller is the one taking the biggest risk. Of course, this isn't all that different from any merchant that takes credit cards; it's easy to start a charge-back, but if you have a merchant account you'll probably get better treatment than Paypal will give you, as they'll just side with the buyer unless it's fairly obvious that they're in the wrong. Local delivery with cashier's check is definitely the best way of all as you can inspect the item firsthand, and there's no fees, but if you're located across the country from the buyer/seller, that's a bit of a problem. Also, cashier's checks are forgeable; there's a whole industry of people who "buy" stuff on Craigslist with fake cashier's checks, or send a fake cashier's check to buy a car from a private seller on CL but for an amount greater than the sale price, asking for the difference to be sent back to them. If you're the buyer, however, this isn't a risk for you, only the seller, as he can't verify the CC is real until he goes to his bank.
No, it's one of the oldest con games in history.
A $100 violin is likely to sound more or less like a crosscut saw. $2500 would be the price of a good but brand new violin. An antique violin like the one mentioned in this article would probably sell for well over $15k, and a Stradivarius for well over $500k (and would probably sound a lot worse than the $2500 brand new violin).
If the picture in the article is of the violin in question, then it's definitely a (very bad) fake, and, according to the law, fakes have to be destroyed, regardless of their quality. A $2500 brand new violin can sound a lot better than a Stradivarius, but if you try to sell it as one you're committing a fraud, and you don't simply get to have it returned to you so you can try again with another sucker.
More likely, the policy stems from the fact that you don't have to return anything anyone ships to you in the mail, while you can still demand that they send you what you paid for, after 30 days (or other reasonable amount of time).
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/products/pro15.shtm
Q. What should I do if the unordered merchandise I received was the result of an honest shipping error?
A. Write the seller and offer to return the merchandise, provided the seller pays for postage and handling. Give the seller a specific and reasonable amount of time (say 30 days) to pick up the merchandise or arrange to have it returned at no expense to you. Tell the seller that you reserve the right to keep the merchandise or dispose of it after the specified time has passed.
A used but playable and durable violin will set you back around $500. A brand new violin, closer to $2000. I wouldn't trust a $100 violin to last more than 2 months without warping, and it'll probably sound more like a saw.
Yes, some of the Chinese cheapy saxaphones are quite nice for the price: http://www.shwoodwind.co.uk/Reviews/Ultra_Cheap_horns.htm http://www.shwoodwind.co.uk/Reviews/Saxes/Alto/Chinese_alto.htm
I suspect this test detected an absence of virtuoso talent. Performers like DuPree, Heifetz, Menuhin and Stern could coax something from a Strad that isn't available from a lesser instrument. The other issue is the constraints that limited their playing time on each instrument. I suspect they would be able to tell the difference between the instruments after several days of practice on each instrument but such a test would be impractical.
He means the text is from American Gods.
You know, my girlfriend is a music teacher (specifically 4th and 5th grade band) and that's one of the issues she always mentioned. Parents want to start their kids on a "decent" instrument, balk at the prices for actual decent horns, then hop on ebay and end up getting a knockoff that ultimately isn't so good. I never realized how big of a deal it was... also didn't know that those horns are actually playable.
Basset horn? Is that a lazy horn with long ears that lays on the couch all day instead of playing?
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
I had this happen to me up until I threatened to haul him into small claims court and then after winning that case sue him for libel. I got a refund, but still had a negative feedback mark.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
For $8000 you could probably buy both an Eigenharp Alpha AND the Macbook Pro needed to run it.
Hard to imagine how PayPal could have a "stranglehold" on eBay, considering that eBay basically invented PayPal, and PayPal is a wholly-owned subsidiary of eBay.
the type of people who appreciate and create music and art are also the type of people who might value form over function.
Complete bollocks. People who create music definitely care about the function (the ability to create music) far more than about how it looks. If you're buying a violin because it "looks pretty" or because it has a famous logo on it, you're not violinist, you're a wanker. Similar motion, but different results.
Some old violins are valuable because they're antiques and (in some cases) because they're very well sculpted. For a collector, that's really what matters, but for a musician the violin is a tool. And modern, well-made violins are better and more consistent than anything Stradivari ever made.
No digital artist is going to run Photoshop 1.0 on a Macintosh Plus when doing real work.
The point is more to why a professional violinist usually tends towards older instruments rather than newer ones. If a violinist can find an older violin in the range between $40,000 - $100,000 range that they like, chances are they would purchase that one before they would buy a newer instrument that costs the same. Also a good number of the highly regarded luthiers have a waiting list of over a year or more for new instruments.
The fact is that most professional violinists cannot afford an instrument that costs as much as a Strad or a del Gesu. Those instruments tend to be purchased for private collections or by organizations that loan high quality instruments to promising musicians. The few violinists that do own an instrument like that are very highly paid concert soloists.
This is called the Fiddle Game.
It was used in Neil Gaiman's American Gods, but I highly doubt he was the first to think about it.
Then why would the seller be flogging it on eBay for 1/10th of that? Unless, of course, it was a fake...
The $150-350 Selmans and Weimars on eBay are not very playable. They have chronic problems with valve action. The pistons are made of monel and usually start sticking after only a few months because you can't make monel on the cheap.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
This doesn't work on eBay, where accepting PayPal is mandatory.
So? That merely shows that Stradivarius violins really aren't specially wonderful sounding and throws into question their actual worth in terms of performing value. It says nothing about whether they can examine the thing and identify that it is indeed a Stradivarius as opposed to one made by some other guy.
No, it shows that there are some amazing newly-made instruments, (some of which are designed to be functional replicas of famous instruments).
The value of a genuine great Strad is ridiculously high because it is a very old, possibly historically interesting, amazing instrument.
There are some very nice violins falsely labeled as Strads, for example.
Then please, oh wise Anonymous Coward, tell us which ones those are so we may label them properly.
Well, if you buy a $2500 violin, you sure wouldn't want to read this article:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/01/02/violinists-can%E2%80%99t-tell-the-difference-between-stradivarius-violins-and-new-ones/
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
Heh. I saw it on Sanford and Son in the 70's. I believe the item was a commode.
Paypal is not regulated like banks are, in the US.
Funniest thing I've read in ages!
I thought the point of money laundering was to conceal the source of or legitimize undisclosed money?
If I buy a fake violin for $1,000,000 the police are still going to say "Whoa whoa whoa there, where the hell did you get a million dollars?"
The buyer is anonymous and picked up the violin in person and paid cash, and could be a made up entity. The police are certainly never going to find them to ask where they got the million dollars from.
It would be nice if you could also see the feedback weighted by the sell price. A reseller could sell hundreds of $2 items legitimately but run a scam for high value items selling less frequently and still maintain a fairly good feedback balance.
From the Regretsy link:
> UPDATE: I neglected to mention in the original post that the violin was examined and authenticated by a top luthier prior to its sale.
Filing in a small claims court is usually very cheap and does not require a lawyer.
But the seller could only recover $750 that way. If you ask for more than $750, the defendant gains the right to a jury trial, and if they exercise that right, the case moves to the usual circuit court instead of small claims court. You can ask for $2500 and hope PayPal decides it's not worth it to fight (it probably isn't, since they'd probably spend more than that just preparing their case), but you risk being dragged into a full-on legal dispute that DOES require lawyers.
Actually, that has been changed recently. If you look at a seller's feedback page, you can see the chart showing the number of positive, neutral and negative comments in the last month/6 months/year. Click on the number of comments, and they're filtered, showing only the neutral or negative comments you want to read. Quite convienient.
What you are referring to came about in the 19th Century as a result of mail order where people who never ordered anything got something in the mail and then a later inflated invoice for it, but the key part is unordered merchandise. If you have a relationship with the seller, and especially if they send you what was pictured, this won't apply, and you are opening yourself to a lawsuit trying to prove tangential issues such as authenticity.
the ebay/paypal pendulum of balance has not been swinging wildly back and forth between buyer and seller. It has always been tilted toward ebay/paypal.
with a dud where I was faced with a $30 return fee on a $50 item, I called up paypal and was told to suck eggs because that's the risk you take with online purchases. I asked for that in writing to drop the case but the fat woman on the other side refused.
Depends on your jurisdiction. In the UK, the limit is £5,000 (about $7800). In the USA, I believe it varies depending on the state. If it does go to a jury trial, it would cost PayPal a lot more than $2500 to fight it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I would vote for this!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
There's no good reason to sell on Ebay unless you're located in China or Hong Kong and selling a lot of really cheap shit, or you're a reseller for that same cheap shit. Honestly, it seems like there's more sellers located in HK or China now than in the USA, selling to American customers.
In most any music store in Lima, Peru, you can pick up a cheap violin for about $25.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
The pendulum of balance has been swinging wildly back and forth between buyer and seller at ebay. It wasn't too long ago that sellers were routinely screwing over buyers and leaving scathing negative feedback if they tried to get any resolution.
The whole "I'll leave feedback after you do" thing was one of my pet peeves as an eBay buyer. If I'm the buyer and you're the seller, then the entire basis for your evaluation of my performance should be whether I paid promptly. That's it. Once I've paid you for the merchandise, my role is over. (Assuming I don't pull a scam of my own claiming the item wasn't shipped, wasn't as described, etc.).
The seller's role is far more complex, and it's understandable that a buyer may need more time to evaluate - say, until the buyer has had time to receive the item and make sure it is as described.
Back when sellers could leave feedback for buyers, I always though that they should have needed to do so at the time of receiving payment. You won the auction, and you paid me within a reasonable timeframe? A+, we're done here. Assuming, again, no scams by dishonest buyers, etc. - but such matters should always have been handled through eBay and PayPal's dispute resolution mechanisms, not via feedback.
Whenever a seller said "I'll leave feedback after you do", I interpreted that as extortion and moved on to the next listing.
They are hoping that nobody will be willing to split the baby.
Do I get extra geek points for reading that as: Two girls and The One Ring? (My preciousssss.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
No, as you already know, Neil Gaiman's work is extremely derivative, and the con is one of the old classics, but the text was quoted from American Gods.
No sig for the moment.
PayPal's been like that for ages, at least in the UK. I often look at what kinds of complaints people have left with their neutral or negative feedback for a particular seller when judging how reliable they are..
Anyone who buys or sells antique violins per EBay and PayPal didn't deserve to have it in the first place.
But you somehow "deserve" to decide who deserves to have what...?
Paganini violins, which are truly priceless except for when they are for sale
Priceless except when they are for sale... Doesn't that kind of apply to everything?
Also, you do realize that Paganini was a composer and violinist, not a violin maker, right? Talking about "Paganini violins" is like talking about "Elvis guitars".
Currently you have to wade through thousands of A+++++++++++++++++++++ useless feedback to see how a seller handles an auction where both parties weren't happy.
You don't, go to someones feedback profile and under "Recent Feedback ratings" click the number of negatives (or neutral). That way you only see the negative feedback. I use this quite often because reading all the positive A++++ comments is indeed pointless.
i look at more then feedback. if i see a 2 month old account with 10k on good feedback i know something is up.
It might cost them a lot the first time, but after bitch-slapping the plaintiff in court and recovering $100k in court costs, others will be discouraged from trying the same thing.
Do you know what "unordered" means? Can you see how that doesn't apply to the case in which you ordered something?
(Kudos if you know where this is from)
Not really, but The Real Hustle has done something very much like this.. Except that instead of a violin, they used a dog. :-) Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Wy1P-XN328
In the U.S. terms of a contract may not be enforceable. This destruction requirement may run afoul of the concept of unconscionability. IANAL.
"Unconscionability (also known as unconscientious dealings) is a term used in contract law to describe a defense against the enforcement of a contract based on the presence of terms that are excessively unfair to one party. Typically, such a contract is held to be unenforceable because the consideration offered is lacking or is so obviously inadequate that to enforce the contract would be unfair to the party seeking to escape the contract.
In and of itself, inadequate consideration is likely not enough to make a contract unenforceable. However, a court of law will consider evidence that one party to the contract took advantage of its superior bargaining power to insert provisions that make the agreement overwhelmingly favor the interests of that party."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscionability
The fake puppy I just had delivered is a sad panda.
Nope. Different kind of ring. You'll have to pucker up if you want to succeed in this game.
It most definitely isn't a hoax.
The violin had a label naming Maurice Bourguignon in it. The interesting thing here is that this doesn't claim that it was actually built by him or even in his workshop. It was used to denote that it was at least built in the image of his style and technique. Think a modern Les Paul replica if you must.
Now I can't imagine you'll get a certified and genuine Maurice Bourguignon at a price tag of $2500. So what we have here is a clueless buyer, corporate insanity and a smashed antiquity with an interesting history. It even was assessed by an expert before the deal.
The buyer comes over like a bit of a brat. The reasoning here is "I don't believe I got an original at less than a 10th of its price. So I will smash the thing because PayPal tells me so." And thus something of value or at least interest was lost.
What really depresses me is that in this discussion people actually argued how you could make a scam based on this work. Rotten, materialistc, greedy, spineless bastards. I don't know how your brain works but I really hope this kind of senseless profiteering idiocy is nowhere near the norm or actually put in practice.
If I felt malicious I'd say never ever send anything old over the Atlantic. But unfortunately this kind of moronic assumptuous Wikipedia fueled ignorance as displayed by the smashing buyer is ubiquitious.
20 minutes into the future
Exactly my thought. Nobody should should have 99% satisfaction. I know for working for the Red clown that about 5-10% of people that order are just there to pick a argument with you.
Thing is, that's ok. In ebay and newegg comments you can clearly tell when somebody has a) ridiculous improbable bad luck. B) totally doesn't know what the product is for and/or does not have the technical skills. & c) unwrapped a DOA and returned it. I alway read negative feedback with a big grain of salt. It's obvious when the feedback is"to bad to be real".
Yes, well, if the seller doesn't get at least reimbursed then I'd take this to court.
TOS do NOT supersede laws in any country of the world including the US. This is why companies are quite quite nervous to have it tested in court.
TOS is a part of a contract. And you can't have illegal contracts. This is why proper contracts have clauses that say that if parts of the contracts are invalidated by law then the others parts still apply.
We have not always been at war with Oceania and TOS can't go against the law. Even if they can go against common sense until someone has them tested in court.
20 minutes into the future
Edgar Allan Poe, his satirical piece on 'Diddling - As An Exact Science'
That's why the best violins available are plastic, milled by a CNC machine to extremely tight tolerances. It'll sound exactly the same in 1000 years as it does now.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Well, if a trustworthy third party had authenticated it, I'd be tempted...
1. But $100 violin, then claim it's a fake
2. Buy $5 violin, smash it up, send photo to PayPal
3. Profit!
Pfft, 95 bucks profit. That's chicken feed. Here's a better business plan
1. Buy $5 violin. Smash it up
2. Exhibit the debris at an art gallery, under a fancy name like "Postmodern deconstruction 7"
3. Buy drinks to an art critic until he writes an article about "the latest development in modern art" and quotes you as a founder of the new movement
4. Sell the debris for one million bucks
Yes, I just visited the local modern art museum, why do you ask?
From the article: "Their [the three stradivari] combined value is around 10 million US dollars, a hundred times more than the three new ones."
$10'000'000 / 100 = $100'000
$100'000 / 3 = $33'333
So the average value of the 3 new violins that were indistinguishable from Stradivari is about $33'000. Those are not cheap instruments we're talking about, and in a whole different league than the instrument featured in the paypal affair. As for the difference between a $2500 violin and a $100 violin, you have obviously never been through the traumatic experience of listening to a $100 violin from close by. I can assure you even a non-expert can hear the difference with both eyes^H^H^H^Hears closed. In fact, it would take industrial-strength ear protectors to not notice the difference.
The problem is that while the car is quite intact, the driver's unconcious due to his head hitting the steering wheel, or worse.
So they'll be able to drive away as soon as a new driver gets there.
I don't read AC A human right
I remember stuff like that. I even remember from some Antique Roadshow where it turned out something was a fake - but it was such a fake that it was actually MORE valuable than the real ones!
It's sort of the situation with bills/coins and misprints. Misprints get out in the wild so rarely that they're considered more valuable than the base unit.
I don't read AC A human right
Paypal claims to be an Escrow service. But when it comes to valuable items, it's often better to go with a real service - which will independently verify the authenticity - of both the item and the payment for the item, before completing the change.
A real escrow service would receive the item, safeguarding and authenticating it. It would also receive the payment. Once the escrow terms are met, the buy receives the item and the seller the payment, minus the escrow fee.
I don't read AC A human right
You mean a horndog?
Having worked for eBay...
This is a scam. The counterfeit policies are to prevent the item from being resold by the seller if returned. This is for counterfeit CD's/dvd's mainly where the value of the item is negligible.
For high value items, like Louis Vuitton stuff, where eBay and Paypal do not have the means of identifiying if an item is fake or not, the item has to be returned and the SELLER has to verify that the item was returned for the money to be returned. If the seller has a history of selling counterfeits, they will get banned from using eBay and/or Paypal for life.
Likewise the buyer, in trying to scam the seller (if the item is legit) has the same problem. If they return the item they get their money back. If they don't, they do not get their money back. The confiscation option (send to paypal) is usually used for items that are clearly fake, in which the money is frozen in the sellers account, and the buyer doesn't get their money back until the Paypal team decides if it's legit or not.
I've seen (while at eBay) items that people have sent in because they were fake, and they were usually obvious garbage like DVD-R discs, fake iphones, etc.
A Violin is one-of-a-kind. I think the origin of this story lies in a copy-paste email that was taken far more literately and the PayPal rep sends the same email for counterfeit DVD's as they do for counterfeit Louis Vuittons. IIRC they can only send out the copypaste emails on initial response, but I think the rep failed to identify that buyer is probably trying to scam the seller.
The fact PayPal decided to tell the buyer to destroy the item, does not force them to destroy it. It does not relieve the buyer of their obligation under the contract to buy.
They are still obligated to pay -- and since they destroyed the item, there is no way they can return it for a refund now.
So not only did they break their contract, they took actions that caused irreparable harm to the seller.
Destroying the item may also constitute destruction of evidence, which can result in further penalties in court.
I would strongly encourage the seller to avail themselves of this legal recourse, and also look at action against Paypal for tortuous interference, w.r.t. the buyer's obligation to pay for the product they have purchased or return the item....
two hobbits, one ring?
I suspect this test detected an absence of virtuoso talent. Performers like DuPree, Heifetz, Menuhin and Stern could coax something from a Strad that isn't available from a lesser instrument. The other issue is the constraints that limited their playing time on each instrument. I suspect they would be able to tell the difference between the instruments after several days of practice on each instrument but such a test would be impractical.
Every double blind study I have seen of this nature supports the idea that beyond a certain not-that-hard-to-obtain level of quality in the instrument, both players and listeners cannot tell the difference between instruments. None of these things are magical you know - the ability to make quality musical instruments has not been "lost to the ancients".
With that said, I would not be at all surprised to find that listeners and players THINK that a particular instrument sounds better when they think that the instrument is a better instrument (that's why the $1000 optical digital cable makes your sound system sound so much better). That's why the double blind is needed in order to tell which instrument in fact sounds better.
If it takes a couple of days (or longer) to become familiar enough with an instrument to get the best out of it, that does present challenges in the blinding.
Except the buyer (the one giving $1Mil of 'unclean' money) wants to get something of value for that million dollars. Unless they can sucker somebody else to give them, say, $800,000 for that fake violin, it's pretty stupid.
They might as well spend $20 on some gas and set the money on fire.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Or if you just like breaking stuff, save yourself the $5. ;)
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
With that said, I would not be at all surprised to find that listeners and players THINK that a particular instrument sounds better when they think that the instrument is a better instrument (that's why the $1000 optical digital cable makes your sound system sound so much better). That's why the double blind is needed in order to tell which instrument in fact sounds better.
If it takes a couple of days (or longer) to become familiar enough with an instrument to get the best out of it, that does present challenges in the blinding.
My favorite among the high end snake oil was the $500 power cable, as if the electrons that had traveled over miles industrial grade conductors would notice a meter of fancy conductor between the wall and the amp. Dunlavy did a lot of double blind tests on speaker wire and consistently demonstrated that listeners couldn't tell the difference between twelve gauge commodity grade stranded wire and hundred dollar a foot speaker cable. That being said I remain of the opinion that the performers needed to play each of those instruments for hours or even days before choosing. Twenty minutes isn't long enough to finish a set of practice exercises. YoYo Ma has said of the Strad he plays (The Davidoff Strad once owned by DuPree IIRC) that he has to coax the sound from it. Learning how to coax sound from a temperamental instrument can take weeks of practice.
Close by? Don't you mean "within a hundred yards and not sheltered by sound proofing?"
In fairness to the slightly cheaper instruments (e.g. at the $1200 price point instead of the $3000 price point), sometimes, the luthiers get lucky and hit a good combination to make a cheaper instrument sound like a much higher quality one. I've seen this recently on a viola I purchased for my child. The $1200 instrument was clearly outperforming the higher priced instrument.
However, any instrument needs to be carefully adjusted to get the best tonal quality out of it. That $1200 viola? It had the strings replaced with a different set better for that instrument, the sound post was adjusted, and a few other things done to clean up a less than stellar tonal quality on the upper half of the A and D strings. The C and G strings were excellent. (The sudden change in tonal quality is what told me to suggest a sound post adjustment, it was starting surprisingly close to harmonic points and consistent through the rest of the fingerboard, not just a single wolf note). Using a bow that works well with the instrument also makes a big difference.
"I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend unto the death your right to say it." -- Voltaire
Here is what I would do to make feedback on eBay better for everyone involved:
1.Both sellers and buyers get to leave any kind of feedback they like (negative or positive or neutral)
2.At some point after the auction, a timer is started to allow the leaving of feedback for a limited time. When the timer runs out, neither party can leave feedback anymore.
3.Feedback left by one party remains hidden until either both parties have left feedback or the limited time has expired. (the timer exists simply to stop one party from leaving no feedback in order to prevent their own feedback (left by the other party) from becoming public/visible.
The purpose of this idea is to ensure that neither party has to worry about the repercussions (including retaliatory negative feedback) of leaving negative feedback for the other party.
It looks as if antiquities are definitely NOT what the PayPal terms of service considered when writing their ToS. Which suggests that PayPal should not be the route for buying/ selling such items. Tough on PayPal ; sad for the owner of the original (assertedly "original", whatever that means) violin. But it has the smell of the Law of Unintended Consequences to me.
I occasionally taunt sellers of fake memory cards on ebaY, making use of the PayPal ToS to avoid returning their fake goods. For that purpose, the PayPal ToS are useful. Different courses require different horses.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
First problem, where are you going to get a $5 violin that isn't broken beyond repair?
If you DO find one, it's likely going to be a discarded piece of "junk" in an estate sale, and unless it's severely damaged (light damage, scratches, cracks, etc can actually add legitimacy) it's going to be worth a lot more than you paid for it, which means fraud would be difficult to ascertain.
If you can find a violin for $5 that's worth 1000x more, why not just sell it legitimately and avoid the legal complications?
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I bloody well hope not! I've got $136million in cash reserves and I'm building up my crew of psionic warriors to launch an Avenger back at Cydonia. What I really don't need is a dispute resolution procedure on a crummy Plasma Rifle to screw up my accounts.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO:_Enemy_Unknown , for those who weren't around in the 1980s. Still fun.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
I know you're lying, because the viola isn't a real instrument.
Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/325/
(tooltip text specifically)
Great idea.... if you're a complete faggot.
BTW, you forgot ( ? ) 3. ?
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
How is it that all these stupid, Neanderthal, mafia guys can be so good at crime and smart guys like us can suck so badly at it?
UK con artists invented an even faster way that I was once hit with (didn't bite because I had read about it online a few months before). Some guys pull up in a transit van with some impressive looking speakers in it. They grab a random person off the street and explain that they were supposed to deliver them but that the guy changed his mind and now they have these top-notch studio grade speakers and the seller is refusing to pay because they were not actually delivered. They need to recover their petrol money having just driven 200 miles so are selling them off for whatever you can get from a cash machine.
In my case the speakers were really obvious cheap crap, full size floor standers but with words like "MP3" and "Ultra BASS" written on the box. I say "hay, I read about this online, I'm surprised you are still trying it because surely everyone knows about it now!" and they left rather quickly.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Regardless of whether or not an item is, or can be authenticated as some form of antique, terms of service that require the destruction of that item in the event of any kind of dispute are clearly unconscionable. The only honourable course of action in this kind of case is for the item to be returned to the seller and the buyer's money refunded.
> What really depresses me is that in this discussion people actually argued how you could make a scam based on this work
Basic security research, silly. How would you go about fixing something if you don't know how and why it's broken? If I want to secure my house I'm going to think of every possible way to break in. Does that mean I'm an inherently bad person?
A quick Google Search shows that it varies greatly from state to state. Mine it's all the way up to 10k, of course, my state's so corrupt it doesn't matter anyway, the judge'll get bought for $500...
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
Hmmm.
Sure, you undoubtedly will save money. But your parent poster neglects to mention that Stradivari in particular most probably used wood from the same two trees (maple for the back and ribs, spruce for the belly of his instruments) for the greater part of his career, so one would expect a degree of uniformity in his materials. His workmanship, and certainly his aesthetic most definitely did vary as he got older.
It's pretty clear that destroying the item is only an option, if the seller *forgoes* the option of having the item returned before refunding the money.. If i bought something and claimed a refund , and destroyed the item first, do you really think the seller would cheerfully refund it? Also, If I claimed it was a counterfeit, destroying the evidence would kind of nix my claim.. I'd think.. Lastly, 2500 is *not* excessive for even a newer violin.. it could have been a 20 year old budget model passed off as 70 years old though.. And remember.. even fake stradivarii, if they're old enough are valuable.. My folks sold one that belonged to my great great great great grandfather in the early 1800s for 300 $ after the guy said it was junk, - they believed everybody who wore a suit ;-(, and he promptly turned it over for at least a 2000% profit.
And if it does not, just print another frame and transfer the hardware.
We're talking about alternating current, so the electrons don't really move very far. They mostly just vibrate in one place.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drift_velocity#Numerical_example
YoYo Ma has said of the Strad he plays (The Davidoff Strad once owned by DuPree IIRC) that he has to coax the sound from it. Learning how to coax sound from a temperamental instrument can take weeks of practice.
If it is a "temperamental instrument", perhaps it is not as "good" as one that isn't as "tempermental"?
Scenario : a seller is selling (say) Kingston USB flash drives of 256GB size for GBP 15 (a true laughing price).
They are scammers : Kingston make no such device (and their 64GB flash drives are about GBP 80 for a real one).
(Obviously I do this as a sort of vindictive assault on counterfeit sellers ; it's not a casual thing, it's a deliberate attempt to make life difficult for them, up to and including jail time.)
The PayPal ToS are quite capable of dealing with some situations quite well. But situations where there could be reasonable uncertainty about the state of an object ... antiques, for example ; fossils might be something that I'd encounter naturally, or minerals (I'm a professional geologist, and I make mistakes too) ... well then PayPal's ToS could cause problems. So care must be taken.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Two girls, one cup?
There fixed that for ya. ;)
IT Admins Group: Where you decide the content
If you take it on to Pawn Stars, Rick has a buddy that will verify it's real for free... On anything in the world..... He has a buddy to authenticate it.....
--- If the bible proves the existence of God, then Superman comics prove the existence of Superman.
As you put your comment in $ (though there are other countries that use $) I will just leave this here:
http://law.freeadvice.com/resources/smallclaimscourts.htm
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?