December 2004

A bloke in the US has recently gotten his own back on an eBay scammer (ok, so it happened in April and has probably been reported on every blog in the web by now but I don't really care). The whole story is outlined on his site and is well worth a read. It's also very long so for anyone who intends to get any work done over the next 2 days or so, so here's the condensed version. Either way, the photos are a must!

Selling a PowerBook on eBay, Jeff was contacted by a scammer who offered to buy the item through a non-existent escrow service. The scam works by pretending the money has been paid to the escrow, getting the seller to ship the item and then do a runner, gaining a free laptop. In this case however, Jeff realised from the start he was being had so he decided to dispatch a ring-binder posing as a PowerBook, complete with a keyboard and marker-created screen and ports.

The real counter-scam was, ironically, the original scammer's idea. Wishing to avoid paying import duties on a laptop worth US$2200 (about US$600), he asked Jeff to declare a smaller value when it was being shipped. Jeff, posing as a naive newbie eBayer, revealed that when he sent it, he'd been asked the value of it and hadn't wanted to lie, but would pay half the taxes if the buyer let him know how much it was. Our scammer, (still on-course to get a new laptop for a quarter of the price remember) decided to pay the tax and the "package" was delivered. Jeff had even managed to get some "internet-buddies" in London to go along to the delivery address and take pictures of the delivery. Priceless.