Buyer Beware
Recently I was searching the Internet for an image of a book cover. The book is Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes. I have owned this book since I was nine years old and still have it, but it is a little worse for wear. I wanted the image of a pristine, legible cover.
I found one fairly easily, but I also saw a “for sale” price with one of the images…for below $7!
What?!?
Yeah, I already had the book–but not in condition like that. And at that price? I’ve read all my life about guys who find optioned-out Hemi ‘Cudas sitting in barns for a couple hundred bucks, but I’ve never found such a deal. I would have been foolish not to buy it.
So I went to the store. The name of the site is “WOB” for “World of Books.” I ordered it and began getting emails just like when you buy anything online.
A week or so later, a package was delivered. I knew something was wrong before I even opened it. It was too thin to be Feiffer’s classic. Had the company advertised the complete, original book, but delivered the one with just the essay but the reprints removed? No, it was much worse. I would have been annoyed with that scenario, but just taken the “L.”
The Bait-&-Switch
Here is what they sent me.
Yup, with an incompetently-removed sticker on the back from some library in Virginia.
I contacted their customer service. Amazingly, they responded. I gave them all the info they requested, and somebody wrote me: “Blah blah blah I apologize blah blah blah I’d be happy to refund your order blah blah blah.”
To which I responded: “Thanks. Can you just send me the book I paid for, instead?”
Two days later I received the word: “This order has been refunded.”
And it was.
Pondering the Motive
So, what was the deal, here? Seems like it would be a disappointing prank, for a prankster. Some kind of grift? No–I got my $$ back. ID theft? I guess my info could be used by them for something–maybe forthcoming credit card fraud. Or maybe there’s some way this improves their SEO? I don’t know. I’m not interested in cheating anybody out of anything, never have been, and so never have wargamed out all the ways to take advantage of honest people online.
What I do know, beyond any reasonable doubt, is that nobody at WOB shipped me that children’s book thinking it was the same book they advertised and I ordered.
The Pervasion of Scam Culture
Scam culture is ubiquitous–and this has me thinking about it.
Know why this site is DOT NET and not DOT COM? Because a hosting company dropped the ball while supposedly transferring us over from a different host, let the domain name expire and never told me until it was too late. When our domain name became available, apparently, somebody in Ukraine bought/secured the rights to it/whatever and then wanted thousands for me to get it back. They didn’t have any content or products to sell that related to the name in any way. They just wanted the name because somebody else had used it so must have figured it was in demand, and they could demand money for it.
Right now the world is full of people who can’t produce or conceive of anything useful, so they seek fortune by stealing or hijacking the intellectual property of others. The entertainment industry is full of such people, which is why there are so many movies about heists, glamorizing thieves, grifters and other scum who have never experienced an independent thought, but are lifted up to young people as heroes and role models because they figure out how to screw people over.
Our government is controlled by such scum. Back when elections were real, the scum were voted into power because they promised lower-caste scum to redistribute wealth from those who earned it to the Official Victim Class. You can probably name several Corporations that have grifted their way to power, backstabbing their way to the top. And of course we have entire countries like Ukraine whose primary function is parasitic, doubling down on an idiotic war and destroying its own young male population in the process, just so it can help the parasites in Washington bleed their host dry.
Parasitism is everywhere, today. There’s no escape from it. The American Dream was: build a better mousetrap that meets a need, and sell it at a competitive price; then use the profits to make a good life for your family. It has been replaced with the American Nightmare: screw over whatever decent people still exist and skate through life without ever doing an honest day’s work.