On Friday afternoon, a reporter and a camera man from the Sacramento affiliate of NBC came to my house. (I think the title of this post is quite fitting because yes, I was extremely excited!) I decided to tell the story because it's rather interesting and there is a lesson to be learned in it.

A month ago I decided to take an electronic step forward, so to speak. I placed a bid in an Internet auction. I've been needing a new hard drive, and this deal on Yahoo Auctions looked fairly good. It was about $40 cheaper than I would pay in a store. The seller had a rating score of 13 (meaning that 13 people had dealt with him, and they all gave him good feedback on the transaction). I won the auction and he emailed me. I used Paypal to pay him because it's fast and efficient. It charges your credit card and immediately deposits the money into the seller's account.

All went well and he emailed me, thanking me for the quick payment. (I did slightly wonder, because his last name was spelled wrong in Paypal, but I figured that was just my anal editing coming through.) A couple of days later, he emailed me to say that my order had gotten mixed up with some other orders, but he had sent it out that day. I gave him the benefit of the doubt, thinking that the weekend and Independence Day would slow the mail down a bit. However, my hard drive did not arrive. I emailed him twice, but never heard from him again. Needless to say, I never got the hard drive.

I went back to Yahoo Auctions and discovered that his rating was no longer a 13. At that point it was somewhere around -60. It is now -129. (Go to auctions.yahoo.com and do an Advanced search for a seller by the name of "harddrives4sale" if you're interested.) It was a scam. Those 13 positive feedbacks were actually himself. It was a very elaborate plan, and he pulled it off. His address that he had given was fake, so those people who sent him checks and money orders got their money returned by the post office. However, I had paid by credit card.

Over 120 people were taken advantage of, and someone began compiling a list of those who had lost money. It now totals well over $10,000. (The price is actually higher, because there were quite a few hard drives, as well as some processors, that didn't have a price listed. Go to http://www.geocities.com/jhamstead/fraud_list.html if you're interested.)

So here I was, madder than a wet hen. I had lost $97.50 to a scam artist! I was furious. I filed a report with the FBI division that deals with this stuff and did as much research as I could on the guy. Yahoo said they could do nothing and PayPal refuses to help. I was able to dispute charges through my credit card company, so I think--and hope--they will just eat the money. That wasn't enough for me, so I wrote up a few of the main points, stressing the fact that I am a poor college student working full time all summer in order to pay my rent, and emailed and faxed about five newspapers and television stations.

And that is basically my story. I will almost definitely be on KCRA's 5:00 evening news on Wednesday. I doubt that any Rinkydinks will see it, because it will just air on the Sacramento station. However, the news station has won a lot of awards and they usually have the most accurate facts.

I suppose the lesson to be learned is to never trust "secure" sites. And, if you use Paypal, don't keep a balance in your account. I was able to dispute charges through my credit card company, but those who paid with the balance in their Paypal account have no hope of getting their money back.

As a conclusion, here is a quote from the email that Paypal sent me after I tried to contact them: "As you are aware, PayPal is not an escrow service, and cannot protect buyers from seller with unscrupulous practices." (The "escrow service" part pushed me over the edge.)

Ell"And that's my story"myruh