Scam Buyer Lessons Learned: Taco Neck Shaq
This article series analyzes real experiences fighting scammers
You have no doubt heard the phrase “There is no substitute for experience.” Some aspects of the hobby game/comic/video/collectible market are absolutely like this, and that led me to create the Scam Buyer Lessons Learned series of articles that are exclusive to paid subscribers.
This is the third article in this series. Check out our first two installments:
If you’re a paid subscriber, you got to learn the thrilling conclusions of each of those scam attempts, and, I would hope, you then incorporated that into your process logic. There were specific things I had to do to resolve the situations in each case, with varying levels of success in the outcome.
For some reason, we had acquired a giant vinyl banner of NBA All-Star Shaquille O’Neal collecting a paycheck from Taco Bell. This item actually sold shortly after our store sale to Amazing Discoveries, so it was residual inventory not part of that deal, and I had to ship it myself. Since I had been dealing with a house flood and living out of a suitcase at an airbnb at the time, I used the UPS Store where I keep the store’s post office box as my shipping outlet. I literally didn’t have a home office adequate to do substantial mailings out of, especially large rolled banners. In fact, I still don’t. I’m living at airbnb #2 since the December house flood, and currently waiting to see if we can close on a permanent house purchase before this lease runs out.
Here’s what this enormous piece of sports memorabilia looked like.
Handsome fella, isn’t he? And even though this giant vinyl banner was anything but cheap, we had a taker who was ready to pony up, or so we thought:
We shipped, heard silence for a little while, and then we got the email that makes every eBay seller want to upchuck their breakfast…
Incidentally, it’s f**king bullsh*t that eBay’s position on this stuff is essentially that the seller is guilty until proven innocent. A buyer can claim any damned thing they want and the seller’s money is on the line, and there’s basically no reciprocal of that. When eBay fails and goes the way of the Sears-Roebuck catalog, I am confident that enforced imbalance of integrity will be among the causative factors.
Sooooo. How did this happen and what did we learn from this? Read on!