What, no close up of the duct-taped seat tube? Strange…
oh god.
“Front fork has been aligned. “
voiceover
The front fork was not aligned.
Can someone explain this ebay store to me? These are all being sold by the same guy. He’s sold a lot of stuff and his feedback isn’t so bad. What gives? This seems so fucking scammy.
https://www.ebay.com/sch/m.html?_ssn=quackdaisy&_from=R40&_sacat=0&_nkw=bike&_pgn=2&_skc=50&rt=nc
Try again
Link doesn’t work
[quote=NOVELTYNAME]Try again
Link doesn’t work[/quote]
So I searched for one the bikes so I could get back to the store and it’s under a different name. Everything tells me that this is a scam but what’s the deal with the feedback? Maybe this link works.
http://stores.ebay.com/Big-Mike-13/_i.html?_nkw=bike&submit=Search&_sid=2749760
If not, click on this and go to the store and search “bike”.
Gotta be a money laundering thing. Likely all the sales are to other shady/fake accounts.
Can you elaborate? All of the feedback is for sports memorabilia. So no one actually receives a bicycle. Right? I know I sound naive.
Can you elaborate? All of the feedback is for sports memorabilia. So no one actually receives a bicycle. Right? I know I sound naive.[/quote]
that’s how it usually works. It’s not a practice that scales well, but it explains why you’ll occasionally see a weirdly overpriced thing pop up on ebay, usually to be sold on very quickly. It’s low-risk because sales platforms aren’t directly involved in anything criminal, and they get whatever cut of the listing the get for everything. No institutional incentive to clamp down on it as long as it doesn’t get out of hand.
I still don’t follow. Why aren’t these sellers reported and removed?
Probably just a hacked account trying to scam people.
Tailhook is maybe right, there certainly is no shortage of scams on eBay.
The thing I’m talking about is not a scam, it’s a money laundering scheme:
Person A owes Person B a lot of money for some not-legal reason. They can’t just withdraw $10k from some account and fork it over directly.
Person B sets up an eBay auction for an unremarkable thing at a jawdropping reserve price. Okay, weird, but not totally unheard of. Lots of people go on fishing expeditions on eBay all the time.
Person B has already told Person A about the auction, they’ve agreed to make this the payment avenue.
Person A waits a non-suspicious amount of time (instantly clicking “buy now” on an inflatedly priced item might raise some flags) and then buys it, routing the money through eBay’s payment system.
Maybe Person B acutally sourced a physical object to ship, maybe not. From eBay’s perspective, what just happened was a little weird, but not totally unheard of. Whole thing is done, and as is the point of laundering money, there’s a mainstream organization involved in the transaction, so everything looks normal enough.
The catch is that you can’t really do this at scale, or rather the way of doing it at scale is opaque to me. I suspect that if you were constantly running auctions for $100k toasters and they were getting bought seconds after being listed, you might eventually get investigated.
Well, that was thorough. Thanks. And yeah, all of those bikes have been deleted. It now goes to an error page.
I heard about a thing recently where people were being paid to post phony Amazon reviews. But to keep things on the level and have the review listed as a verified purchaser, the shipper had to actually ship something somewhere. So random people started getting random things in the mail. Not what was being reviewed, but something cheap like a keychain.
The internet is weird man. And I think we’re only seeing just the beginning of the possible scamming that is going to take place in the next 20 years. I fully anticipate a day where no one uses the internet for anything real because you won’t be able to trust anything on it anymore.
Planet Money episode about the practice of review purchasing, not exactly money laundering but similar process.
Yep. That’s where I heard it.
I can’t believe the first thing I thought of was how annoying it would be to ride with the handlebars having no resistance. Forget that it’s attached to a car, I’m stuck being frustrated that they didn’t mount the fork like goldsprints.
I think you should buy it and make those changes!
Dude! My first thought too. How do you get leverage?