For the Digg crowd, I managed to get the Goatse’d scammer page. Here’s the text:
| Written by Mauso |
| Tuesday, 28 August 2007 |
| An eBay scammer’s response to being goatse’d… thirteen times.
Background After two years of dabbling as both buyer and seller, I have come to the conclusion that eBay is a cesspool of filth. Within thirty minutes of placing my first bid, for example, I was hit with no less than three spam messages from other sellers trying to entice me with a better deal. The spam is really just a minor annoyance. Far more malicious are the scammers that take your money and run (though my personal experience has been safe). What I don’t understand are the scammers who place a substantial bid on an item, with no intention of making the payment. They might request your bank account details under the guise of making a deposit, but that’s standard procedure. At least with Australian accounts, that account number is useless. I mean, unless you want to make… you know, a deposit. I once had a buyer, named ‘smithking10’, who requested “my details” three times (and on each occasion, I gave him the information necessary to send me money) before giving up. Sometimes I wonder what else he expected me to include; would he have preferred my passport number? Maybe the login for my online bank accounts.
The Dilemma Last week, my cell phone died. Having once worked in a phone shop, I know that for a consumer hoping for a refund, “died” can mean any number of things…
When I say that my phone “died”, however, I mean that it was working perfectly when I went into the cinema and that since coming out, its most effective function has been serving as a paper weight on my desk. I can only assume that it was overcome, during Superbad, by Michael Cera’s lovable performance. Such were the circumstances under which I logged onto eBay, hoping to snare a bargain. I made a few small bids on a Sony Ericsson model that I’m particularly fond of, but learned shortly after being outbid that if I was to afford textbooks this semester, a lowering-of-standards was in order. So I came to bid on a T226, a model whose aesthetics have been likened (by its designers) to the “decomposing remains of a monkey’s excrement”. After submitting a sufficiently generous bid, I waited online for an hour to see if I won the auction. During that time, I received three email messages from random eBay members, all in a similar format.
Free shipping, money-back guarantee, and all according to “official procedure”? Wow! At whom do I throw my money? I reported the first two of these emails because it is strictly against eBay rules to sell items in this manner (even when it’s not a scam). But by the time a third such email had arrived… I’d had enough.
John Cheese to the Rescue I was reminded of an article by one of my favourite internet comedy writers, John Cheese. In his article, The 419 Scammer, he documents a series of increasingly hilarious emails exchanged between himself and a scammer, culminating in a climactic email in which he included an image called Goatse. For those who have not heard of Goatse, you can still be saved. The picture depicts a naked man’s backside, stretched beyond the point of abstraction. By this I mean: you literally could not comprehend what I’m talking about until you see it. Indeed, many people’s first reaction is to stare, horrified, for a full thirty seconds before they can believe what they are seeing. This guy could traffic enough crack over the border to kill the population a small town. I was inspired by John Cheese. Replying to the scammer immediately, I attached thirteen images of Goatse. As the scammer used a gmail account, I knew these images would display automatically on his screen (without having to download each one at a time). All thirteen, in one hit.Two Days Later This afternoon I received an instant message from the guy, and our conversation is pasted below (with some punctuation and capitalisation fixed for readability, but not spelling). Much to my amusement, I was condemned as evil by a man whose screen name was “good”. But there is nothing amusing about a thief so thoroughly convinced of his own righteousness.
Conclusion – for those who require closure… Mauso did win the eBay auction. His dead phone went on to live a fulfilling life as a hockey puck, and his bank accounts lived happily ever after. To this day, Mauso continues to study engineering and hopes one day “to create a lifelike robot, so astoundingly stupid that I can take out my numerous frustrations by murdering it”. His psychologist refused to comment. |