{"id":61,"date":"2013-12-13T00:54:12","date_gmt":"2013-12-13T05:54:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/?p=61"},"modified":"2013-12-13T00:56:40","modified_gmt":"2013-12-13T05:56:40","slug":"a-thousand-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/2013\/12\/13\/a-thousand-words\/","title":{"rendered":"A Thousand Words"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Clatworthy of Nottingham, England, recently made a costly mistake. A blogger at the website of Atlanta Journal-Constitution<\/em>, George Mathis, tells us all about it in this post<\/a>:<\/p>\n

[H]e saved his shillings or whatever they call money in jolly ol\u2019 England these days and purchased a \u201cSpecial Edition\u201d Xbox One on eBay for $750.<\/p>\n

It was special all right.<\/p>\n

Instead of receiving a video game console, he received a crudely printed picture of a new Xbox\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mr. Clatworthy is a 19 year old college student, and Mathis describes him as \u201cthe father of a 4-year-old boy and potential purchaser of eBay condoms in 2009.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s fun to ridicule people, isn\u2019t it, Mr. Mathis? You must think it\u2019s unheard of for a 15 year old to father a child, and that someone who was dumb enough to do that<\/em>\u00a0would be dumb enough to do just about anything, right? And only someone that dumb, the dumbest of the dumb, could fall for this sort of scam?<\/p>\n

If he\u2019s going to be flinging these stones around, I hope George Mathis\u2019s house isn\u2019t made of glass. Maybe he\u2019s never fallen for a trick ever, and none of the friends and family he considers intelligent never has. Perhaps he reads every line of the license agreement when he buys software and electronics. Good for him.<\/p>\n

Most of the comment threads in stories about Mr. Clatworthy\u2019s misfortune make mention of the fact that he\u2019s a teen father, like it\u2019s prima-facie evidence that he\u2019s an idiot, which his falling for the scam auction only confirms. It must have been nice for these people to have had such wise and error-free teenage years. I\u2019m jealous.<\/p>\n

Clatworthy is only the most recent victim of the \u201cphoto only\u201d or \u201cpicture only\u201d scam, which was first used long ago. The earliest description of it my intern found is from 2002<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The most common vector for the scam is eBay<\/a>, but it has been done on Craigslist<\/a>\u00a0as well.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s technically legal, though certainly immoral. The scammer generally includes highly detailed technical specifications of the purported item, then adds at the end, in a very tiny font, that it\u2019s the picture that\u2019s being bid on.<\/p>\n

The scam is infamous enough by now (TV\u2019s Judge Judy once accepted a case involving it, and angrily dispensed her advertiser-supported justice on the scammer) that few people fall for it anymore. It shouldn\u2019t still work for the scammer in any case; eBay and Paypal automatically reverse these auctions. Mr. Clatworthy got most of his money back, so he didn\u2019t suffer unduly.<\/p>\n

But even when the careless or na\u00efve fall for these dirty tricks, they don\u2019t deserve scorn and ridicule. I\u2019d hate to think we\u2019ve become so cynical; it\u2019s the scammers who should be ridiculed or shamed. They\u2019re making the world a worse place to live in.<\/p>\n

Mr. Clatworthy actually came out a little ahead after his ordeal: a game store local to him gave him<\/a>\u00a0a free Xbox<\/a>\u00a0to compensate him for his troubles.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not crazy about this outcome. People shouldn\u2019t be shamed for making dumb mistakes. But it teaches them the wrong lesson when they actually profit from them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Clatworthy of Nottingham, England, recently made a costly mistake. A blogger at the website of Atlanta Journal-Constitution, George Mathis,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,10,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-consumer-products","category-media","category-scams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/ts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}