Tablet Relisted

Short Story: The tablet has been relisted at http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=290129179836 if you’re interested.

Long Story (aka, my lack of faith in mankind is affirmed):

So, imagine my hapiness this morning when I get an alert saying my tablet sold with someone using the Buy Now feature.  Woot!  I got my full asking price in less than 8 hours!  Well, not so fast.  I send an email asking for confirmation on the address and what shipping method they’d like to use.  I get a response from someone indicating they would like to send the tablet to their son as a suprise gift.  Oh, their son is in Nigeria.  My entry indicates I don’t ship outside the U.S.  (ever wonder why when you order a Dell they ask if you plan on exporting the machine outside the U.S.?) 

So, I send another email and say I’d be fine with sending the tablet to a U.S. Address and they can then ship it to wherever they please.  Since they paid my full asking price I even offered to pay for shipping myself (UPS Ground).  I get another email saying that he sent the payment via PayPal and expects the item to be shipped to Nigeria.  Another email that says he sent an additional $300 to pay for the shipping.  Hmm….it must be VERY expensive to ship things to Nigeria.  It also said I should get a PayPal notice soon to indicate payment has been recieved.

Right on que a PayPal email comes in….well, kind of.  It was from spoof@PayPal.com.  It looked very offical, minus any real good links and such.  Come on…..

A short chat with a Ebay representative later and I’ve relisted the tablet and have been awarded a refund of the ending auction fee.  I have to say that their chat support is orders of magnitudes better than Sony’s.  I waited less than 2 minutes to get to a represntative and waited less than a minute or so between responses.  Unlike Sony where it took about 30 minutes to get connected to a representative and had about 4-5 minutes between responses…oh, and unlike EBay…they didn’t answer my question.