How I got someone on Ebay to buy something they backed out on after winning
reddit.com
reddit.com
== Things that make us sympathetic to the OP ==
- He's a redditor, just like many of us
- He just wanted the money she promised him, nothing more
- He couldn't attend the game - this presumes he wanted to
- He used Google Voice - cool
- She was mean to him (and most of us are men, aren't we?)
- He has just added a cancer-stricken relative to the story along with a donation button
- She writes poorly, he does not
== Context this story sorely needs but is unlikely to ever get ==
- Face value of the tickets
- What his sunk cost is for the tickets ($0? $50? $600?)
- How he found himself with only 24 hours to unload the tickets
- Any sort of verification of the cancer-donation story
That said the cancer thing is sketchy as hell in context, thanks for mentioning it.
I mean, how paranoid do you have to be to think that fact that he is a reddit user is him "masterfully crafting a story" that "omits any semblance of objectivity". Even if the rest of your list had made sense (sorry, it doesn't), that first point would have made me ignore the rest.
It's quite possible that one or more aspects are exaggerated or made up, as with anything you ever get told, but none of your points are "well that seems unlikely to the point that we must assume it's not actually true", so I don't see why you'd question any of it.
Pretend for a second that this wasn't ebay.
I go to best buy and start looking at TVs. I find one that is pretty cool, will be great for playing wii fit on, can't wait to get it home, and I tell the sales-person that I'd like to buy it.
On the way to the register, I realize "Wait a second, I'm living check to check and rent is due tomorrow. I can't afford a freaking new TV!", so I look at the sales person and say "Oh, I...this is embarrassing, but I actually can't afford this television at all. I'm really sorry."
Would Best Buy be in the right here if they sent somebody up to me to tell me "Wow, that is a really cool TV you just bought! My daughter realllly wants that exact TV for her dorm room and you totally bought the last one! I'll buy it from you for $1000!"?
Absolutely not. In fact, there would probably be a lawsuit involved.
Was it a crappy thing to do to try and back out of an auction like that? Yes, absolutely, but it was an even worse thing to scam the woman out of money that she said she didn't have.
Bad moves all around, in my opinion.
Edit: wow, reading these reddit comments is really, really disheartening.
edit2: I'm not saying that what the women did was okay. She will probably be banned from ebay. This is fine, this is what should happen. Guys, we teach children that two wrongs don't make a right, don't we? Is there a reason we teach them this or do we just like the phrase because it rhymes?
Yes, she made a mistake. But it was her mistake. And that mistake would have cost the seller ~$700, because the item she agreed to buy had a shelf-life. And her mistake prevents any other bidders, who presumably would have paid had they won the auction, from attending the event.
They were both wrong.
He didn't go to the ticket booth and say: "Hey sorry, I can't go, so give me a full refund."
People make mistakes, but they have to be responsible for them.
In short, I can imagine the redditor having trouble selling these tickets.
what if your scenario was an auction for a high value item like a painting instead? would it be ok for her to back out then?
One school of thought is due unto others as you would have them due unto you. I believe PG once told a startup that they should pay back all other investors first. This is an example of this. PG didn't come out ahead, but maybe the startup founders got to save face. Reputation is more valuable than currency anyway.
The other school of though is that we are to make the world a better place (more fair and just). This view of the world justifies almost any end. This seems to be the approach that the Redditor took.
However, with that being said, had this guy not been a douche he would have sold the tickets to her at face value (maybe + gas) but nothing more. In the end, they are both in the wrong.
Try calling an airline after you've ordered a ticket online to explain you can't afford it and want a refund. Just because it's ebay doesn't mean it's any different.
If they do, they would use the court system, they wouldn't use a well known con to recoup their loss.
When the order is binding, has much to do with how the ToS of the site/store is written. Some sites take the attitude that an order is not binding (on the buyer or seller) until payment is made. Some sites take the opposite view.
In some cases it gets rather squirrelly when you have a seller with a limited quantity of the item (like 1 or 2) and a buyer who wants to use a very slow payment method (check, MO, etc). What do you do if the buyer wants the last one, in a hot market, but also wants you to wait week +/- for payment ?
Beyond that grace period they'll usually charge a fee of some sort, and the refund might be in the form of a voucher or credit.
Quote: "I overbid and my husband won't let me buy these. Sorry and enjoy the game! :)"
Yes, I do agree that it was wrong to scam her on it, but her attitude over the whole situation wasn't the best either.
When she got the offer for 1,000$, she raised it to 1,100$. Then that e-mail that she sent in response isn't so good either.
Well, she may have made an "honest mistake." Or she may not. We can debate whether she should lose $600 or the author should lose the tickets, but that debate can only happen if the author made a decent attempt to prevent the loss, for example by offering the tickets second chance to other bidders or by driving down to the game and trying to sell the tickets for cash. He then could have pursued her for the difference between the $600 she promised to pay and whatever he managed to obtain for them using reasonable means to sell the tickets.
However, the author took it upon himself to defraud her out of the $600. He changed the situation from getting her to pay for the tickets she bought for herself into getting her to attempt to make money from arbitrage based on a false and fraudulent promise of his.
This is absolutely wrong, and it makes no difference whether she had originally backed out of the transaction or not. The story sets her up as a "bad woman" to play upon some of the most vile behaviours social animals have, namely believing that there are two classes of people, "good" and "bad," and the bad people don't deserve any decency or protection under the law.
I see defrauding her into paying for the tickets exactly the same way that I see bullying visible minorities or depriving persons we think are guilty of a crime of their legal rights. It stems from the same "They're a bad person, they don't deserve consideration" beliefs.
It may seem like a horrible Godwin-esque comparison, but how is this different from torturing a petty thief into making a confession? I don't mean to suggest that this is bad because "They might be innocent," I mean even if they're actually guilty, don't we as a society still want to treat them with decency?
This woman may have acted badly. But we should still treat her with decency, lest we as a society become vile ourselves.
In my judgment, both parties should be investigated by eBay. I don't know her side of the story, so I can't say what eBay ought to do about the choice she made initially. But if the author acted as described here, I would expect eBay to condemn his choice.
Another solution would be for them both to negotiate a lower price.
Basically, he says, "You can pay now and get the tickets or you can pay up in small claims court after the tickets are expired." Knocking a hundred or two off the price saves him the paperwork involved.
It's still a bad idea to agree to contracts with the intention of renegotiating under the threat that it'll be easier than suing, but that doesn't change the fact that a new contract is easier to make than enforcing the old one.
Nothing about her obligations makes lying to her right, just as nothing about breaking the law gives a police officer the right to beat a confession out of a suspect.
I disagree. If you want to get something for less than the offered price (i.e. OBO) you should talk to the seller before you place a binding order. Taking a valuable commodity out of play, to force a negotiation, is plain wrong.
Remember the saying: "You can't cheat an honest man"
What happened here isn't even slightly uncommon in our industry, it just comes with the territory. What we sell is cars, thousands of them per week.
If somebody bids on a car, but then doesn't pay up...they don't get the car. They might get thrown into something called a "KO book", which means that they'll be banned from our auction, and everybody else's.
That's it. That's the end of it.
If one of our sellers pulled what this seller did, they would almost certainly be banned from ever doing business with us again.
As a completely unrealistic example, imagine if by some magic, cars that weren't sold exploded. If you had a buyer back out, and as a result, you could never sell that car again, that person would most definitely be put in the "KO book". I think the situation is different, if only slightly.
There should be some understanding from the buyer of the tickets that backing out is potentially costing the seller a lot of money. For this, I can understand the sellers frustration, if only because he might have had several extremely viable offers outside of hers, that are now lost.
That said, I don't agree with his reaction at all. Is it not possible to try and contact the other interested buyers who were out bid?
She did agree to buy the tickets in as binding a situation that can arise in an online auction, but to scam her to get the money is wrong.
I'm not rich and $600 is a lot of money to me. But I would rather eat a loss of $600 than scam someone to gain that money because $600, $6000, or any other number, isn't worth it.
The way the poster went about getting his money back was absolutely stupid. Whether it was amoral or not, he could be criminally prosecuted for his actions.
Whether or not what he did was moral, I know of no enforceable law he violated. She, on the other hand, entered a binding contract on eBay and then violated it. She could be prosecuted; he, as far as I can tell, could not.
Your characterization of his actions as "he made a verbal offer to buy goods at a certain price, and then backed out" leaves out the fact that he intended to back out all along, and that the lie was for personal gain. If he had intended to buy the tickets for $1,100 from her, he would not have first sold them to her for $620.