A number of people that we know who have at one time or another had very serious eBay habits have, at one time or another have been ripped off on eBay. Some see it as a right of passage, one that makes you pay that little bit more attention the next time.
Clearly problems on eBay are the exception rather than the rule. We’ve also had some really great experiences with people who have been more than generous, going above and beyond what was required.
One of our bad ones was bidding for and winning the chance to send someone some money for a train simulator (it was for a friend, honest). The bit that we missed was that the money went to someone who had no intention of giving us the software for the money we’d sent.
When you realise this is the case you then get angry; contact eBay; they tell you about the scheme they have in place to provide financial recompense; you find out it’s actually not worth doing because the difference between what you paid and the admin charge makes it not worthwhile. You put it down to experience.
laptopguy , take it into your own hands
We live in a world of user-generated content, where the individual can have a voice as loud as the wealthiest newspaper owners. All they’ve got to do is get a blog.
One enterprising fellow, who goes under the moniker ‘laptopguy’, who claims to have been ripped off by buying an incorrectly described and broken laptop on eBay has taken matters into his own hands.
Warning: Given this is the Internet, we’ve really have no idea if any of this is true or not.
The story goes that after extracting the hard disk from the laptop, laptopguy proceeded to find all of the information that had been left on there when it was sold. In the process he says that he found out much more about Amir Massoud Tofangsazan (the seller we’re told) than he would probably want shared with the general public.
Some of this collected information (details of passport, bank account details, hotmail accounts, etc) and photos (friends, porn, foot fetish, secret photos of women in tights on the underground, etc) were then loaded on to a blog with blow-by-blow details of the alleged unhappy transaction.
This isn’t the first time a hard-drive has caused some embarasment to its seller on eBay. Back in April 2005, Brandenburg police in Germany made the same mistake.
True or not, in this recent case, the blog appears to be attracting the attention of the world with 117 comments posted as we write. We can see this story blowing up globally.
Direct action appears to have got laptopguy his redress, if not his £375.
Take care with the comments, some of them are NWS, and other just plain offensive.