Selling quilt online nothing but trouble
How much trouble could a quilt made from Harley-Davidson shirts cause? Wow, did I ever find out!
I made a quilt for a friend, Sam, out of a dozen of his Harley-Davidson shirts. As he showed it off, people said, “Man, you could make a fortune selling those on eBay.” Ever the entrepreneur, Sam came to me with an idea.
“I’ll buy the shirts, you make the quilt, and we’ll put it on eBay and see what happens,” he said.
With visions of dollar bills dancing in our heads, Sam and I went to the local Harley-Davidson dealer. Sam and I found 12 shirts that we liked, and he paid the $250 tab. I took the shirts home and went to work.
Soon I had a quilt ready to go out into the cosmos. I had never done anything on eBay, but I found the sign-up process, though time-consuming, straightforward. I was able to figure out how to list my item, how to send them a photo, and my quilt was “on.” Now to sit back and wait for the bidding war to start!
Within days I realized that eBay is a bit like the Yellow Pages. You must know what you are looking for in order to find it; there is little chance of stumbling upon something. After the initial listing brought no bids, I relisted my quilt and, for an additional price, put it on the front page of the site.
I did get some action, but not what I wanted. In my description of the quilt, I listed an e-mail address. Within days I had many replies. All were from people who did not identify themselves, but who obviously were non-native English speakers. The theme of the notes was along these lines:
“Dear Sirs: You be honest and I be honest. I sended you the moneys and I did not get my products. You send products now or I call police. Do this soonest.”
As my “products” had received no bids, I knew these were scam attempts. I forwarded each message to eBay, getting back reassurances that they were looking into the problem.
Next I received a message saying that my wide-screen TV listing had been accepted. I sent it to eBay’s fraud department.
During all of this, there was still no action on the quilt. Nobody was seeing it; nobody even knew to look for it!
I started receiving increasingly nasty e-mails demanding that I return the “moneys” that had been paid into my PayPal account for the “old mirror you selled to me and did not give to me.” My PayPal account was silent, so I knew this was another scam attempt.
Then came a message from eBay telling me my account had been closed and that I was barred from buying or selling for life due to my “illegal activity.”
Anxiety now turned to anger. I told eBay that I didn’t really care about the ban for life, as my experience had been so awful I never wanted to deal with them again, but that I was upset at being punished when I had done nothing.
Astonishingly, I got a real reply, not just a form letter. This message told me my password had been compromised and the banned-for-life status was temporary until I could prove to them who I was. I need merely fax to eBay a few items to prove my identity: a copy of my driver’s license or other official photo ID, a bank mortgage statement, a credit card statement, or a utility company bill showing my name and address, and a pint of blood. (Oops, I made up that last item.) They also required my account user name, password, and e-mail address.
I printed a copy of their message and faxed it to them with a note: “You have to be kidding!’”
With identity thieves lurking everywhere, I’m not going to fax this information out for anybody walking by the machine to pick up.
EBay may be where “it” is, but you won’t find me there again. Oh, and I still have the quilt.