Connections: Time Is Money
Somewhere in cyberspace there’s an answer to this question: Why would someone buy four items on eBay, charge them to my personal credit card, and have them sent to my East Hampton Post Office box? It wasn’t me. I really don’t need a great big, cheap, water-resistant man’s watch, thank you very much.
It might have been weeks before I noticed something mysterious was going on, but for a phone call from an American Tourister vendor, who rang me up to tell me they needed a street address: The ugly luggage set I’d ordered could not be shipped to a post office box.
A three-piece set of shiny black hard-side rolling cases? No, not mine.
Whoever did this also ordered a FitBit — well, I could use a FitBit, I suppose — as well as an overpriced copy of my late husband’s book “The South Fork.” How odd. The only answer to this strange occurrence was that someone out there was experimenting to see if they could successfully order some things to be sent to me, the legitimate holder of the eBay and associated PayPal account, before ordering some things to be sent to them, elsewhere.
But, really, if that’s the case, they needed to do this four times? I just don’t know.
To try to find out what was going on, I enlisted the help of my daughter, who is light-years ahead of me where computer research is concerned. She found out that the orders had been made on Tuesday, June 27, and canceled the luggage, which was the only order that hadn’t yet shipped. Then, just to bring more sunshine to my Friday afternoon, I had a long, unproductive telephone call to eBay’s customer service line. Eventually, we were able to cancel all of the purchases, thank heavens.
It certainly seemed suspicious to me that my eBay username was I’d never heard of before, my initials followed by a long string of illegible consonants. Apparently, “hsr.xbskxkx.phskjj” had been an eBay member since August 2016. Who? What?
Unfortunately, it didn’t end there. Two days later, eBay sent me a survey to find out how my experience with customer service had been. The request came to my correct email address but “hsr.xbskxkx.phskjj” was the salutation. Later that day, the Tourister vendor sent an email saying it had refunded my money, $159.99. I’m still waiting to get my money back for the rest of it. It was all very time consuming, not just for me, but for my daughter, the eBay customer-service representative, and, presumably, the scammer, too. Do scammers really have that much time on their hands? Does this sort of crime really pay, in relation to, say, a Starbucks salary?
“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers . . .”
William Wordsworth was not aware that the computer would someday change how most of us go about getting and spending — or how much time most of us would wile away chasing white rabbits down endless internet sinkholes. But if you count all the time my daughter and I spent trying to get to the bottom of this eBay misadventure, the poet would concur that we had laid waste our powers.