Thursday, May 8, 2008

Yeah, People Are Awesome

Sorry to invoke Judge Judy but the "star" of this clip is just to good to pass up regardless of the pop culture setting...



I came across this remarkable bit of daytime television justice because I was reading about how useless Ebay has become and how overrun it is with scammers. The article told a story about a man that had listed his laptop 5 times. The first time it didn't sell because he didn't pay the $20 extra dollars to get a "featured" listing and it was always so deeply buried that it was never higher than 6 pages deep in searches for identical items.

After that he posted it 3 more times and had people bid outrageous sums for it but insist he ship it to Nigeria, he would get spoofed emails from "PayPal" saying that due to Nigerian law he had to send them a shipping receipt before they could release the funds.

On the 5th atempt to sell the laptop he stated in his listing that he would not ship to Nigeria and this caused his account to be shut down presumably by an automated system looking for keywords.

This entire time he tried several time to contact Ebay and only got automated email responses that had nothing to do with the problems he was having. Even after his account was shut down he could not talk to a person on the phone or by email. The online "Live chat" proved to be a bot.

So the asylum is unmanned and the inmates are running amok... use Ebay at your own peril.

1 comment:

Katy said...

Unbelievable.

Well, I take that back. Sadly, it IS believable. People like that are everywhere in this world.

I'm amazed the girl was dumb enough to try to win her case in court on national television. Wow.