Ziemowit Pierzycki bought a $1500 used lens from an Amazon seller who turned out to be a scammer with an ingenious trick: the crook researched a recently widowed person across town and sent them a parcel with a couple of baking mats addressed to the deceased “or current resident.”
The widow signed for the parcel, and thus Amazon saw that the shipper had sent something out with a valid tracking number, and that the USPS tracking system reported that the item had been signed for, and refused to process a claim for fraud, closing the trouble-ticket and telling Pierzycki to buzz off.
The scam only works because Amazon’s anti-fraud system only validates the shipping city and the tracking ID, but doesn’t consider the actual address or the weight of the shipped parcel (the parcel weighed 8 ounces, while the lens weighs 3.2 lbs). Somehow the scammer figured this out.
My guess is that since this scam was conducted across state lines using the US mails, Pierzycki could involve the US Postal Inspectors, but that’s a long and slow process compared to getting an Amazon refund. Alternatively, Pierzycki could ask for a refund from his credit-card company, which might trigger some in-depth human scrutiny from Amazon.
It’s been a whole day since we learned about another example of systematic, widespread fraud by America’s largest bank Wells Fargo (ripping off small merchants with credit card fees), so it’s definitely time to learn about another one: scamming mortgage borrowers out of $43/month for an unrequested and pointless “home warranty service” from American Home Shield, a billion-dollar scam-factory that considers you a customer if you throw away its junk-mail instead of ticking the “no” box and sending it back.
$43/month gets you pretty much nothing: people who tried to actually use their AHS insurance found it impossible to get them to actually do anything in exchange for this money.
Eli Bosnick had the best response to this ridiculousness.
“If I gave you a bowl of skittles and three of them were poison would you still eat them?”
“Are the other skittles human lives?”
“What?”
“Like. Is there a good chance. A really good chance. I would be saving someone from a war zone and probably their life if I ate a skittle?”
“Well sure. But the point-”
“I would eat the skittles.”
“Ok-well the point is-”
“I would GORGE myself on skittles. I would eat every single fucking skittle I could find. I would STUFF myself with skittles. And when I found the poison skittle and died I would make sure to leave behind a legacy of children and of friends who also ate skittle after skittle until there were no skittles to be eaten. And each person who found the poison skittle we would weep for. We would weep for their loss, for their sacrifice, and for the fact that they did not let themselves succumb to fear but made the world a better place by eating skittles.
Because your REAL question…the one you hid behind a shitty little inaccurate, insensitive, dehumanizing racist little candy metaphor is, IS MY LIFE MORE IMPORTANT THAN THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS OF MEN, WOMEN, AND TERRIFIED CHILDREN…
… and what kind of monster would think the answer to that question… is yes?”
“Happy 22nd Birthday, DOOM! To celebrate this year, I present a photo of Tom Hall’s DESIGN CORNER at id. Really, it was his “office” without walls, much like Les Nessman of WKRP in Cincinnati, with masking tape demarcating his area. Tom was hoping that someday walls would be built there. This is where the picture of Tom using DoomEd was taken. I was in the doorway of my office to take this pic.”
