Buyer Beware (of stolen computers on eBay)
You knew buying stuff on eBay can be risky, right? Especially used computers.
An officer showed up at my home and told my wife they tracked a stolen computer’s location to the IP address of our house. WHA??? Apparently, they can do this.
At first they said it was a Mac laptop, and well, the only Mac laptops that I’ve ever had were purchased directly from Apple, so I knew that was wrong.
They said it came from Michigan. Crap! That’s where the Power Mac G5 that I got my dad for Christmas was coming from, but that’s not a laptop, so…
The officer goes to his car for a few minutes and comes back and says it’s an iMac. D’oh!
Well…
I did buy an iMac from a seller in Michigan, and it arrived with a torn up box (the absolute WORST packing job I had ever seen) and a chip in the bottom-right corner of the screen (no doubt due to piss-poor packaging). The seller agreed to do a partial refund, not only because the item arrived damaged, but it was also NOT the computer described in the auction description (it said it was a 2.4 GHz “2008” iMac, but it was really a 2.0 GHz 2007 iMac). The 2008 2.4 GHz model was the one I wanted, so rather than use the refund to repair it (new bezel/glass was $100), I decided to re-sell the one I just got (that was damaged) myself and get the correct model (which I did - THANK YOU PowerOn!).
So who pays for this? I certainly don’t have the money. I kind of think the person who sold it to me may have not even known (for sure) that the computer was stolen - it was from some “wholesale” shop, so it could have been a pawn shop that paid cash for the computer and resold it on eBay. Will eBay’s “buyer protection” cover me and/or the person I sold the computer to?
I’m now very paranoid.
I didn’t know it was really possible to track a computer like that, unless it had special software installed to “phone home” in case it WAS stolen. But it could have very well had such software installed - it looked like it was set up with kiosk software, which seemed pretty odd to me, so maybe it was stolen from a kiosk in a public place?
What else are they tracking from my house? WTF? I’m too young to die (and too married with children and a mortgage to go to jail).
Where’d I put that Xanax???
