Not surprisingly, the combination of extremely limited supplies of Playstation 3s and eBay proved to be quite a volatile mix. How else would you explain gems like the guy who sold an empty, promotional PS3 box for a whopping $1,100? Moreover, there were 22 bids, and the winner even jumped the gun to leave positive feedback (auction #260054534684).
Another take on the matter was auction #160053311905, where some enterprising fella registered the email address “sonyps3authority@gmail.com” and put it up on the block for $199. Just the email address, nothing else. There were six bids with the winner raking home the prize for a bargain $265. But hey, at least shipping was free.
Of course, the pendulum swings both ways. In auction #280050635902, the winning bid for a PS3 60 Gb was – drumroll please — $9.95. No, it wasn’t the classic $2,000 shipping scam, just $50 S&H. Inexplicably, it appears the seller chose to end the auction early for a fraction of the sticker price. So what’s the deal? Why didn’t the seller wait for the $1,250 buy-it-now price?
Could it be that maybe, just maybe, the seller received an email where a buyer offered to send him a money order for the $1,250, perhaps a little more even, except he wouldn’t have to pay eBay the full commission? Money orders are good as gold, so why not play along and save a few bucks?
Except, of course, when the bank calls back a few days later and informs the guy he’s been pwned. To everyone’s great surprise, the money order was fake and he has to repay the full $1,250 or have an unpleasant chat down at the police station. Either way, the guy spent a night out in the rain not to mention a couple hundred bucks for nothing.
Or perhaps I’m all wrong and the buyer really was happy flipping a brand-new PS3 at a heavy loss. How should I know? But I do know what takes the cake. Auction #160053877347 sold not even a box or an email address, but the contact information to a friend who had a PS3 and just might be willing to sell his system “if the price was right.” As humor columnist Dave Barry would have said, I am not making this up. It got 20 bids and scored $1,100 for a name and, I’m guessing, a phone number to someone’s voicemail.
I’ve seen many more deals like this over the past couple days. The kicker in all this is that in most cases, there’s not even any real trickery going on. The sellers are very, very clear about the fact that it’s just a box, an email address or a phone number, and yet the suckers keep lining up to throw their money away.
One guy sold even two PS3 game cartridges, no console, for $680. He went so far as to include pictures of the Wal-Mart receipt clearly displaying a purchase price of 60 bucks a pop. That’s the point where it gets difficult to keep fuming about the scammers picking the pockets of eBay n00bs who don’t know any better.
Where’s the line between fraud and stupidity? If I walk down an unlit alley in a bad part of town at 2 AM, waving wads of dollar bills and yelling from the top of my lungs that I’m unarmed and loaded with cash, at what point do I have to start accepting some blame when a big guy with a lead pipe generously offers to help me carry the money?
That’s one for the philosophers, but I will tell you this: read the fine print when you go shopping for your PS3. It’s caveat emptor out there. And I mean it.