Nigerian scam artist strikes but is foiled by my awesome skills

I think I wrote about the portable DVD player I won at a work conference in Boston. I finally decided that we really would never use it, so I put it up on ebay last week. The auction ended yesterday. Until about 2 hours before it ended, everything was going just fine. Then, even though I said in the auction details that I would only ship to the U.S., someone in the UK started bidding and had the top bid. Seconds before the auction ended, someone in Malaysia put in an outrageous bid and won. WTF? So here's a DVD player that retails for $300 and sells on ebay for around $200. Ms. Malaysia "bought" it for $405. Brand new user ID. 0 feedback rating. Goody...

Within minutes of the auction end, I send a message to the Malaysian and ask for a U.S. address to ship to and tell her that if she doesn't have a U.S. address I can't sell it to her. She sends me an e-mail to tell me that she's in America (yeah, right), her husband is in Nigeria, and she wants me to buy some Dolce and Gabbana cologne and a card to ship with the DVD player for her husband's birthday. Uh huh, sure. And to compensate me for my troubles, she will pay me an extra $150 to cover the costs of these extra items and shipping.

It gets better.

I get a spoofed PayPal e-mail that says something along the lines of, "The money has been deducted from Ms. Malaysian's account but we'll hold it until we get a shipping confirmation from you; then we'll give you the money." That's not how PayPal works. F-ers. The e-mail was a horrible fake. It didn't even look like a PayPal e-mail. In the meantime, I look at the auction and send a second-chance offer to the top U.S. bidder (skipping the schmoe in the UK), and she accepts. At least I sold the thing. I sent another message to Ms. Malaysia to let her know that she's not getting the DVD player and that I've forwarded the fake e-mail to PayPal for investigation. A little later, I get another better spoofed PayPal e-mail offering me an extra $200, but I still can't get it until I give them proof of shipment. I report that one to PayPal, too, and tell Ms. Malaysia yet again that she's not getting the thing no matter how much she offers. She stops sending messages. She deletes her ebay account. I report the unpaid item, get my final value fee returned, and all is good.

But wait, there's more.

Today I get a message from ebay saying that a user that bid on my auction was actually an account that was hacked and that the transactions with that user should be canceled. The user was the UK person, my real next highest bidder, who I thankfully skipped when I made the second-chance offer. What an ordeal.

The moral of the story: don't trust anyone who's offering you an absurd amount of money for an auction when there are conditions like having to buy additional stuff for them and ship it to some foreign country.

This ended up being a long story. It certainly livened things up in my electronic world these past couple of days.

Tomorrow is our company art show. The "Timbertones" choir that I'm in is performing a couple of songs, and Marc is displaying some photography. Plus, he won the program cover contest with his picture of Newspaper Rock. Unfortunately, my recorder quartet can't perform this year because two of the members don't work at Timberline anymore. Boo. Oh well. We'll probably play down at Saturday Market this summer, which should be fun.