Damn those Scams

So my sister of all people got her identity stolen. Someone had swiped her contact info along with her credit card information somehow. She theorizes that it was done when she made an online donation to the Darfour relief effort. She was lucky since she monitors her credit card activity quite frequently and noticed charges being made to porn sites. She called her credit card company up and they automatically refunded her the charges and closed the account. They said there were also two pending charges that they would follow up with, but it didn’t seem to be a big deal. She thought that was the end of it. But it wasn’t.

The “two pending charges” are apparently for an eBay listing this scammer had posted selling a used car that doesn’t exist.

Apparently someone else got scammed in the process of all of this. The same identity thief used her contact info to register an account on eBay and sold some unsuspecting guy 3 states away a car. He took the money and then gave the guy my sister’s contact info. So now he’s calling asking where his car is, and of course she doesn’t have it.

She immediately contacted eBay about it, and they said their “Investigations Department” would look into it. She has also contacted the local police department to file a report just to have everything documented. This is what inflames me about eBay, they’re a multi-billion dollar company, but what responsibility do they have to their customers when incidents like this happen? What are their duties in restitution?

eBay might be a blessing to some, but more and more, its becoming a big curse to most.

Even the most technical-savvy people get scammed.  Russell Beattie got phished last week, and now he’s getting a barrage of scam/spams.  I had this happen to me last month.  A nigerian scammer won an auction of mine, and asked me to not use pay pal.  He had the audacity to use a netherland’s address/yahoo account, then proceed to ask me to send it to his son as a gift down in Nigeria.

After contacting Ebay, they were pretty apathetic about it. All they did was refund me the percentage of what I would’ve had to pay if the person actually did pay, but they did not offer to refund me the listing fee, and wouldn’t even let me relist the item.  They told me to use the “second-chance” offer to other bidders, so basically, I would have to sell my product to someone else for a lower price.  If Ebay isn’t incited or angry about scammers infiltrating their site, how am I supposed to believe they even care to police themselves that well.

NPR finally covered what was floating around the net for a few months, how to stop waiting 20 minutes before talking to a live person when you call customer service for most large corporations. For example, you have a problem with your credit card and you call American Express, only to be prompted to type in your card number, press 1 for english, etc. Or your cellphone service has a billing mistake and you try to call Cingular only to be rerouted to their automated answering system. Its funny to hear Steve Inskeep from Morning Edition, a usually pretty muted guy, get so excited to learn how to skip all the annoyances when calling AppleCare.

Strangely enough, NPR doesn’t actually link the list on their website, so here it is in all its glory.

After receiving 2 phone calls from this number, I googled it and was annoyed that somehow, my phone number had leaked into the spam-machine of scam/telemarketing according to this link to Rippoffreport.com.

I called T-mobile to report it, and see if I could have it blocked and the best answer they had for me was that they could change my phone number. So there-in lies the rub, you can now keep your phone number, and take it to any carrier, and no one is ever going to lose your number, and they’ll always be able to contact you, but what happens when your phone number is poisoned? Do you give up all the benefits to keep your privacy? What a pain the ass.

I registered my cell phone number on http://donotcall.gov as suggested by someone. They called about 6 or 7 times, each time I ignored the call. Strangely enough, after I registered, they’ve called twice but each time I had missed the call since I didn’t have my phone on me. Next time they call, I’m actually going to pick up and alert them that I am on the list, and kindly request them to take me off their list, and if they don’t, I probably have some legal recourse. Oh how I hate telemarketers.