Too good to be true

9 September 2003

Last night I spotted a great deal on eBay. The lot was a 1Ghz Powerbook and a 23” HD Cinema screen, with a Buy It Now price of £1300. New from Apple, that kit would be worth closer to £4000. The seller had just under 200 positive feedback ratings, with zero negatives, which should be good sign. It seemed too good to be true. So I looked a little closer.

Warning sign #1: None of the feedback ratings were from the last 6 months, and none were for transactions where this user was the seller – he’d always been the buyer. Not so good after all.

Even so, I was soo tempted that I emailed the guy and asked some questions about the condition of the items and shipping etc. This morning I got a reply.

Warning sign #2: His email address was flagged up by SpamCop. So he’d either been using an open relay, been sending spam in the past, been wrongly listed by SpamCop, or most likely, using some sort of anonymiser.

According to his email, he had two of these Powerbook/Cinema display sets, both brand new in their original wrapping. In order to save us both the time and hassle of an eBay auction, he was willing to let me take one for £1000, or £1900 for the pair! Plus free shipping and insurance! Blimey!

Warning sign #3: Too cheap!

The items are currently in Spain, but he was willing to ship them with “Display unit, no commercial value” customs status to avoid paying import duty and tax.

Warning sign #4: He’s not worried about customs laws, so why would he be bothered about, say, dealing in stolen goods?

Even so, I was so tempted by his offer that I had to keep taking reality checks. I always thought that people who get conned out of their money are a bit daft, but I can see how it happens. A few more beers and he might have had me.

Warning sign #5: Too good to be true.

That said, I don’t know that the deal wasn’t legitimate, but see the evidence for yourselves. I descided that if it really sounded too good to be true, then it probably was.

So I still have no Powerbook.

About Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Cadburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

Comments

§ George: Drew,
Take the plunge. I have the 12” powerbook. It does everything I want it to do. The performance difference between my Powerbook and ibook is huge. You really notice it when I have to compile code. Zend Studio (my IDE of choice for PHP) runs like a dream on it. Although I havent put MX on as it seems to have a nasty habit of taking over everything.
§ George: Of course when I said take the plunge I didn’t mean you buy it from Del Boy via e-bay
§ tomjleeds: Ih-uh. Bad idea.

Unless, of course, you don’t mind being nicked for receiving of stolen goods.
§ Alex: don’t do it drew! sounds well dodgy... i reckon they may well speed bump the powerbooks soon though, as they have just done it to the iMacs (meaning mine is now out of date... bah!).
§ Les: This sounds familiar - I’m sure I’ve heard a remarkably similar story before - Powerbooks coming from Spain, customs irregularities, etc. Sounds *very* dodgy. You *might* get the kit, but I wouldn’t bet on it...
§ Drew: Dodgy indeed. I think I’d rather have a new PowerBook now anyway :)
§ jixor: apparently a lot of ebay users have their accounts stolen and used for dodgy stuff like this.
§ starlight: Dude, I had this happen to me and got SCAMMED! It was for the 23” apple display - brand new, way back when it was $3000 and the guy was going to sell it to me for $1500 - shipping included. Unfortunately, it was before I was so savvy savvy, and I ended up sending him the money and that was that. Nada. $1500 to some guy in some country have some hella good time. I learned that folks aren’t all generally good. And that just because I can’t imagine someone wanting to take advantage of me, some people have no problem with it. I’m not proud of my scammed self, but not so embarassed I wouldn’t want someone else to have a heads up.
§ Elizabeth L.: I found a similar auction (item number: 2762385697) on Ebay for a G5 plus a 23 AND 20” Cinema Display (plus more!) His auction states for ”pre-approved bidders only.” I emailed the guy to see what’s what. He is selling it all (outside of Ebay) for $3000. I checked his feedback and found the same type of thing you did. Then I entered ”display unit/no commercial value” into Google, and it brought me here. Ebay needs to be made aware of scammers like him. I can’t imagine how many people have fallen for this already. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. In this case, it’s obvious.

All in the <head>