Friday, January 26, 2007

Oh Those Wacky Nigerians

Hello all. Life's been busy and I've been lazy so I haven't posted for awhile. But I promise the next few days I'll have some high comedy for you, brought to you by one-part poor EBay security, four-parts Nigerian greed.

The Background:

Even after getting burned twice trying to sell an extra XBox 360 I have, I decided to go back to the EBay well. One of the reasons is we own a lot of it at work, and I feel it's my duty as a shareholder to use their service when I can. I'm starting to think they have a real problem with security, but I'll leave that post to another night.

I have a PS2 with a ton of games. 28 equals a ton in this case. I've gotten samples from game companies for a few of them, but in general I've bought most of them over the years. I bought a dance pad and DDR Extreme 2 for the kids but they were too young to enjoy it at the time and therefore it quickly got packed up in a box. Anyway, all this crap is taking up space, so I decided to try to sell it on EBay.

From my recent experience, you need to post in your ad that you won't sell outside of the US, and won't accept bids from users with feedback less than 5. That's because EBay's new user screening sucks. HARD. In my XBox 360 debacle, the first fraudulent bidder signed up as a US user but wanted me to ship to the UK, while paying from a different address. This account was brand new. A friend of mine took 3 tries to sell his Wii bundle and ran into similar problems.

I therefore posted I will cancel all bids that are from someone with less than 5 feedback unless they email me and get permission first. I also said US buyers only. In a moment of weakness, I decided to use the Buy It Now option in case I found someone really motivated to buy a PS2. That was not so smart.

Within THIRTY SECONDS of posting the auction, my Buy It Now was hit. And who by, you may ask? A brand new user with a generic name much like John Doe. Unlike in a regular auction where you can shitcan any bidder you don't like, if Buy It Now is hit the auction ends. That means I'm stuck with this turd of a buyer, who I already know with 95% certainty is going to me a scammer.

My confidence level rises to 100% when I get the email from this individual. I'll share that with you tomorrow, but the scam he seems to be trying to run is so lame that I have a hard time believing anyone falls for it. Then again, I have a hard time believing anyone watched Katie Coruic voluntarily in the morning either, and now she's on prime time news. I shouldn't be amazed by our populace's race to the bottom, I guess.

Anywho...I'm now in the process of trying to get some sort of trophy from this Nigerian scammer. I was hoping he'd pull the Fake Cashiers Check scam, so I could frame that badboy and put it up on the wall. Unfortunately, $175 doesn't qualify for Cashiers Check treatment so that dream will have to wait until I EBay another day. Instead, my goal is to get as many of the following as possible:
1)a picture of this guy
2)him to prepay shipping so I can send him some bricks and bags of Jobu-shit on his tab
3)the Holy Grail: him to send me cash to cover shipping

I've been saving my conversations with him so far, so I'll start posting them over the next week. I have no idea how far this will go, but for now he's buying my act. He believes I'm a dumb college kid, and that I believe him because he is on a religious missionary assignment - in the UK. I also believe his story that his son is attending computer college at the world-famous Nigerian University. (Come to think of it, didn't Larry Ellison graduate from there?)

So stay tuned. Hopefully I'll soon have some pics and better stories from this adventure.