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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.
The point is that it wasn't a fake, so PayPal royally screwed the seller.
But PayPal is entirely composed of evil douchebags, so I agree that it's not really surprising.
Yes and no... if it is a fake, then presumably there'd be no great loss in destroying it. However, it could also be that the buyer is mistaken, and the article is authentic. In that case, it makes more sense to nullify the deal (ie: return the merchandise and refund the money) rather than "nullifying" the merchandise.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
They'd be able to tell from the pixels.
It isn't so much that the item wasn't a fake (though an expert did claim it was genuine), so much as that in the case of antique violins, being fake doesn't mean its worthless by any stretch of the imagination. So, PayPal had someone destroy an irreplaceable piece of history out of their own ignorant policies.
1. But $100 violin, then claim it's a fake
2. Buy $5 violin, smash it up, send photo to PayPal
3. Profit!
It's (ostensibly) a prewar antique. This isn't a fungible item. Paypal orders someone to destroy a counterfeit handbag, you might get reimbursed the cost of the bag if your take them to court, but that violin isn't coming back.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
If the seller doesn't want to pay for the return, fine they can agree to proof of destruction instead. But if the seller would rather have the item back, they should have the option to pay the shipping charges to have it returned.
Paypal doesn't have the ability to determine if the violin is really a fake, they shouldn't be the ones insisting on destruction of counterfeits.
Idiot.
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.
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.
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.
There is probably an orchestra program at a local school who would have loved the donation of a knockoff violin but instead paypal (if the story is true) decided to be a douche--and they wonder why people don't like them?
Paypal really needs to fix the gaping holes in their dispute resolution process. I could order an expensive cashmere sweater from you, wait until it arrives and then say "hey, WTF is with this t-shirt you sent me instead of the sweater, I demand a refund". You will know that you put the sweater in the box, but paypal will ask me to return the item with shipping confirmation and then give me a refund. You'll get a box a few days later with a $2 t-shirt from a thrift store and I'll get to keep the sweater and the money.
This happens all of the time...I don't know what the best defense is (except transferring money out of paypal immediately upon receipt so the worst that can happen is you end up with a frozen paypal account with a negative balance)--I suppose your best bet would be to insure the package for the full value and then claim that someone must have stolen it in transit and replaced it with a t-shirt (either that or they are a scammer). That should get the postal inspectors to show up who are more likely to look at the evidence and decide that the scammer is a felon for attempting mail-fraud.
Bottles.
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.
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).
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)
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.
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.
Until someone invents a time machine, yes the law of supply and demand is pretty strict about the idea that old things can't simply appear in sufficient quantity to offset a high price due to scarcity. I suppose you would also like to insist that Jack Daniels tastes just fine as day old corn mash and that letting it sit in a barrel in an old building in the middle of nowhere for 11 years adds nothing to the value; a good number of people would disagree with that, too.
Zombieland, the girls did it with a ring in the gas station.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
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.
I don't really see why anything old has an excessive value beyond its use.
Oddly, the type of people who appreciate and create music and art are also the type of people who might value form over function.
For violins in particular, as wood ages its tonal qualities change. Therefore, older violins are more valuable than new violins because they sound better. Well... not necessarily better but they have a more desirable sound and warm.
More importantly, a violin made in a factory in china is going to sound like crap compared to a hand made violin by a skilled luthier, even if it is brand new. An old violin was most likely made with great skill and care, and taken care of through the ages. To play something that is centuries old with a rich history is an amazing experience. This is why, while the Stradivari violins might not necessarily sound better than a modern violin from a master luthier, it's worth millions of dollars more.
Yes. Hell yes. Defamation among many other charges should be filed against the buyer. The buyer is, as far as I can tell, were the real tragedy started. The buyer and the seller needed to work it out. Now if the seller decided not to deal with the buyer for the return of the item it's a problem but it would be understandable.
In the end, as far as I'm concerned, when dealing with transactions of over anything I can't afford to lose, I would take steps to ensure and insure the transaction. Among these would be, if it were an antique, to have it professionally identified and certified as such. Shipping such an item becomes a tricky thing... what's to prevent a seller from shipping a fake thing after having a thing identified as genuine? And then, what is to prevent the recipient from getting the genuine article and claiming it's fake, presenting a fake as their evidence? But by having a professional certify it before shipping and sealing the box himself perhaps that would offer a measure of security to the transaction.
This is all a very tricky situation where trust and convenience are at odds with one another. To achieve balance, "someone" has to assume risk over the transaction and hopefully they will be aware of who bears the risk. This way, the risk taker can then do his due diligence to ensure and insure the transaction.
It sounds as if in this and all cases, the seller is the risk bearer. And this is a good lesson for ALL of us whether we are buyers or sellers. Knowing in advance where the risk lies, one can decide for one's self how to mitigate and reduce risk or to decide if something is simply too risky to proceed in the first place.
This situation is tragic as it does not take into account the possible forms of loss which PayPal has created through its policies. They need to be fixed. But in the mean time, people need to be fully aware of the risks and who owns them. (For example, *NEVER* use ACH as the means of money transfers.)
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?
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.
Sounds more like a fiddle to me.
(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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
With the prevalence of cameras, why does the seller not record said item being packed, and end with it having the shipping label affixed where you can see the label tracking numbers time stamp etc clearly.
Film it up through the point where you hand it to the shipper. At least with the post office, it's my understanding that once they come to possess the item you're shipping, it is literally impossible for you to legally get it back before delivery.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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.
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.
Next time you see a minor collision between a new car and a Chrysler from the 70's you will see that build quality has changed over the years.
Or if you climb out of your new car after the accident and the people in the Chrysler don't. The clever thing about newer cars is that in an accident they will crumble except for the passenger cell, eating up the energy so that the driver and passenger don't have to.
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."
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.
As wood ages it decomposes, warps, etc., and the "tonal qualities" of a violin would do the same.
A well kept violin will not decompose or warp. As wood ages, it also hardens, which allows it to resonate more when played. Further, the type of varnish applied to the wood plays an integral role in its sound, and that too can improve with age. In fact many new instruments are made from wood that's hundreds of years old.
Furthermore, I'd take a factory machined and produced violin over a hand-made one from a master any day.
So... how long have you been playing violin exactly? I've been playing violin 15 years and have studied with plenty of people who've been playing for life-times longer. I've never met anyone who would choose to play a cheap factory made violin. Constructing a violin is an art, not a science. You can program a computer to create a violin, but in my experience I have never played a violin that came from a factory that was even comparable to a hand made instrument. And I threw in China because all the terrible factory machined violins I've ever played happen to be from that country.
There's no reason a violin should be "worth" millions of dollars simply due to age/brand/rarity.
Age/brand/rarity are the reasons why almost everything has worth in the first place. Worth is all about perception. If I had millions of dollars, you bet I'd give it to play the violin I saw Jascha Heifetz play in black and white when I was a child. Of course that experience would be worth $0 to you, but that doesn't mean I'm somehow "wrong" for wanting to pay that much.
No, the 70s Chrysler is fine only at very low speeds, such as a fender bender. I own an old (60s) vehicle, and have been rear ended in stop and go traffic. My truck came out in better shape than theirs. However, if they were going more than 5-10 MPH, things would have been quite different. Let's take a look at some videos, shall we?
1960s Crash Tests, mostly GM vehicles I believe.
SSC
The people in the Chrysler don't need to climb out of the car. The car is perfectly fine, and is ready to drive away with minor cosmetic damage.
It's true, the people that were in the Chrysler have flown out through the windshield, leaving you free to drive their car away.
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.
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.
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
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?