>I ran into one of those types of guys on Yahoo!
>auctions with computer parts. Sent him $500 for stuff
>that never came. Law enforcement just shrugged though
>even though I had all the evidnece and stuff that I
>was robbed out of that money but they still didn't do
>anything. I considered suing the police to do
>something, and suing that joker, but it just isn't
>worth it sometimes.
Your local police aren't really obligated to put much effort into
solving a crime like this, and suing them probably wouldn't do
any good even if you did have the time and energy for it.
What you can do, with better results according to the people I've
known who dealt with fraud on eBay, is report the entire incident
to your local postmaster, assuming that the payment used the
postal service in some way, e.g. payment through the mail, postal
money order, etc. The USPS has people who specialize in mail
order fraud, and there's nothing like a call from a federal agent
to scare a small-time criminal into doing the right thing.
In all my time on eBay, more than 100 purchases and I don't
remember how many sales, I've only had two bad transactions. One
was a "new, unopened" set of Photoshop that was an obvious
counterfeit -- reported it to Adobe and the seller was sending
all his customers refunds within a day. The other was a cycling
jersey that I sold by COD that the buyer never claimed from the
post office, so it came back and I was out the cost of postage
and COD fees. All in all, not too bad, really, no worse than the
rate of bad checks and unclaimed special orders I saw when I
worked retail years ago.
--
josh@xxxxxxxxx is Joshua Putnam
http://www.phred.org/~josh/
Build your own bicycle frames. See
http://www.phred.org/~josh/build/build.html
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