Kiss of Death
Sep 18th, 2002 by mark
I am starting to develop a complex. My luck with online auctions is continuing to be awful.
The “From Russia With Love” Powerbook auction continues to be a source of amazement to my wife and me. The seller claims, in his words, “to be in the bussines trip in Ukraine” and refuses to use an escrow service. All I have to do is Western Union him the money and his wife here in the states will “shipp” me the Powerbook. His latest offer was for me to send half the money now and half after I got the package.
There was another Amazon auction with over a week to go that looked promising, but yesterday that one dropped of the list. I am assuming someone made them an offer they couldn’t refuse.
Yesterday morning there was a new Amazon auction from Atlanta with a low take-it-now price. I contacted the seller via e-mail to see about using the escrow service and after several hours got a reply stating that the item had already sold.
This morning I found a Powerbook auction on eBay with a low buy-now price; the laptop had been at a failed dot-com so the seller didn’t need much to part with it. I sent an e-mail asking for purchase directions (per the site) and was waiting for an answer when I discovered the auction had been pulled by eBay since “an unauthorized party had accessed the account.” I was told to stop any payments I may have already made and contact my credit card fraud department if necessary.
If I hadn’t actually held one of these beautiful machines in my hands at the local Apple store recently I would start to think they were mythological and that I was bidding on a dream rather than reality.
I am seriously considering changing my persona on these two auction sites. It seems that bidding as me is the kiss of death.
Sigh.
