Loyal Moses

Oh you little Craigslist dirtbags…

Posted on 11 March 2010

I have a habit of browsing Craigslist for deals on new hardware to quench my little tech-addiction and ran across this little bait of a headline:

APPLE 17″ MACBOOK PRO 2.8 GHZ UNIBODY GLOSSY SCREEN NEW – $1200

Of course, the pleasant aroma of SUCKERS-CLICK-HERE was wafting all about, but I have to admit I have a second little addiction; telling these little punks exactly what I think of them, then reporting the behavior.

Why? well, besides it just really making me mad… I have friends, family and colleagues who’ve been burned for $1000’s of dollars. It’s no good all around.

Another reason, is that quite a few of these scams target westerners in a dual purpose fashion. Taking our money to use it against us; snag the cash, then ship it off to a little anti-American terrorist group that in my opinion needs a GPS guided gift with a Made in America stamp from a Predator drone at 35,000 feet.

Counting slowly… 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1… deep breath… much better; moving on.

I sent Marky-mark a little bait email to get him all excited about a potential sucker-transaction. He replied quite quickly with the following:

“Hello,

Still available. The price is correct and not negotiable.
I’m willing to pay for all shipping and insurance fees because I’m from London, UK. I have a small electronics wholesale company here and I sold a lot of products in United States, in collaboration with a partner there. We stopped our work and now I have available in my warehouse a large quantity of products in US version.
All products are BRAND NEW in box, with receipt and 2 years international warranty.
Just let me know your full name, shipping address and personal email address then I’ll arrange the shipment through UPS 2nd Day Air.

Thanks“

Marks a nice guy! Free 2nd day shipping from the UK! Ya know, you don’t often find great businessmen like this anymore… wait a minute. He wouldn’t be scamming me would he?!

WARNING

If you have read up to this point and really think this is a good deal and want a piece of it, please close your browser window, go outside and try and clear your head. You are not thinking clearly enough to be on the Internet right now.

This is my response to Mark; but I fear I won’t get a reply.

“Mark, mark, mark…

What a dirtbag.

Of course you are in the UK selling Apple computers to people on Craigslist in the Seattle area at less than 1/2 of retail pricing.

I own an information security company and have an Apple reseller account and get a measly 8% discount off of retail pricing in one of their highest reseller tiers. Apple machines are premium sellers today, so the one and only reason to be listing a new machine at this price is to try and hook poor suckers deeper than their caution and common sense normally allows.

My guess is, you would like payment in the form of a money transfer, maybe Western Union or just be happy to take my credit card information. Of course to make me feel comfortable you’ll give me a UPS tracking number to convince me that the product is shipping, when in fact a tracking number means nothing if the product is never picked up or dropped off at UPS for delivery.

UPS 2nd day / express would run you about $400 US to send it to me. So of course you offer this at no charge, cause you are just such a nice guy and this makes the deal so amazing.

In addition to these obvious signs of lame criminal behavior, you are using a random @gmail address which of course a quick google search shows no results, so its obvious that you don’t do legitimate business with it.

I’ve already notified the FTC as well as the high tech crimes department of our local police agency as well as the FBI’s high tech crimes division. Chances are, there is nothing that will come of this based on my reports, but you’ll eventually get nailed. You losers always do.

My recommendation for you is to realize the full extent of what you are really doing here, crawl back in your little hole, clean your act up and try and become a productive member of society. Whatever your reasons are, realize this is absolutely wrong.

Hope you get caught sooner than later.

Loyal.“

Okay, truthfully… I only filled out the FTC’s online fraud forms, but never contacted the local high-tech crimes departments… not like Marky cares either way, but it made me feel better to call on such big guns even though they really don’t care either. Seriously… am I the only one that cares?!

Of course, I do realize this does nothing, but it sure makes me feel better. Like a super-hero, patrolling the dark streets of the World-Wide-Web…

This is Mark Wayne’s Gmail address for anyone who thinks I am nuts and wants a sweet deal on a 17″ MacBook Pro, shipped freely from the UK: waynemark4545@gmail.com

And a note to those who do use @gmail, @hotmail, @msn, @live, @mac/me, @yahoo, etc addresses, IMHO there is absolutely nothing professional about any of these free or semi-free email services… even though a domain and hosting service takes almost as little effort to setup and maintain, it lends a little something-something to your Internet appearance.

UPDATE : It was removed from craigslist about 25 minutes after my email.

Oh well, back to browsing Craigslist.

Enjoy.

~moses