I admit it–I have a thing for schadenfreude. Please note this article from TheRegister.co.uk:
Police investigate angry eBayer’s revenge site
And I quote:
Police are investigating a disgruntled eBayer who took online revenge after paying £375 for a laptop which, he said, did not work.
The buyer recovered the hard drive from the malfunctioning notebook, finding it full of personal details, allegedly including access to email accounts, 90 voyeuristic leg shots taken on the London Underground and gay porn. He posted the material on a website, naming and shaming Barnet 19-year-old Amir Tofangsazan as the seller.
The controversial site is here:
http://www.amirtofangsazan.blogspot.com/
I simply can’t bring myself to feel sorry for Amir. A little Internet sleuthing turns up the following:
The original eBay auction . Up for sale is a refurbished HP laptop with a 2.8 GHz P4 with 2G of RAM, a 15″ screen and a DVD+/-RW. Ironically enough, the hard drive capacity is not listed.
The seller, amir6626 , who is no longer a registered eBay member with a feedback score of -2 (0 at the time of the auction with only one or two total feedback tops).
The buyer, spikytom , an eBay member since ’02 with a score of 79 (70 at the time of the auction) with a total of 1 negative feedback.
The bid history . Of note here is the fact that the auction was sniped 20 seconds before ending for GBP$350 (roughly US$660), quite a deal on the laptop that was listed.
Also, the one piece of positive feedback showing on Amir6626′s eBay profile is from nicktofang, who seems to share a name quite similar to Amir Tofangsazan. nicktofang also has mediocre feedback, is no longer a member, and started with one piece of good feedback from amir6626.
Certainly looks fishy to me. And consider this–in addition, The Daily Mail reports that Amir allegedly pulled a similar scam on someone else, a woman who says she paid him £147 for an iPod which never arrived.
People on the slashdot fora are wringing their hands about vigilante justice and extortion, but–assuming that the buyer’s story is true–I say Amir has gotten what’s coming to him.
I’m not saying that there aren’t legitimate questions about the buyer’s story. For instance:
- Where’s the proof that Amir committed fraud? All we have is the buyer’s word that the laptop arrived broken–no pictures of the broken item, no description of what was broken. Just a statement that the RAM and DVD-ROM were wrong (and, according to the auction page at eBay, these specs were wrong, so if nothing else the buyer has a case that the item was misrepresented).
- Certainly there’s an extortion angle, because the buyer has clearly stated that if Amir refunds his money and apologize, he will happily take down the web site.
- And one would ask: if Amir’s rating was ZERO at the time of the auction, why the heck did the buyer buy from him? The #1 rule of bidding on eBay, as far as I’m concerned, is read the seller’s ratings before participating in the auction. I’m stunned at the number of people who complain that they got scammed on eBay, and it turns out that they bid on an auction where the seller had a negative rating.
But again, assuming the buyer’s story pans out, Amir has earned this pain.
(I question who Amir’s “threats” are coming from, by the way. The buyer didn’t post Amir’s phone number on the page, and while it’s certainly easy to find someone’s home number online if you have the right info, my guess is that the threats are coming from the people in the suggestive photos Amir so carelessly left on his hard drive. If I posed for pr_n and near-pr_nographic photos that wound up on the ‘Net because my friend was stooopid, I’d threaten him, too).
Regardless, this is another outstanding example of why you should make sure you eliminate all personal info from your PC before you sell it. Simply formatting/deleting the content from the drive may not help, because the data will be still there, only the index (allocation table) will be changed. You can use something like Darik’s Boot and Nuke http://dban.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] for deleting content permanently. The Eraser [heidi.ie] program is another excellent (and free!) way to securely wipe your hard drive prior to sale, in addition to providing everyday secure wiping services (including secure file deletion, free space, and swap file wiping with multiple overwrite pattern options).
In the meantime, join me at pointing and laughing at Amir Tofangsazan. And please feel sorry for his family, because regardless of what Amir deserves, his parents certainly don’t deserve to share in their son’s public humiliation.
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