Things have been a bit rough lately.
I’ll admit, by my own slopiness I lost $1,200 on eBay. The scam went like this: the seller had a Paypal link on his page, but when I told him I paid through it, he told me that he had just switched banks and that I ought to send a check. I did a search on the address he said, and it was a real street address with a real person behind it. No worries, right?
Well, right off the bat I think you see my two errors. First off, I didn’t pay through Paypal, and lost eBay’s insurance. Second, I never called the guy I was going to send a check to, nor did I ask for a reference. Ouch.
So meanwhile, the guy I sent the check to thought he was a sort of . . . payroll processor, and that because foreign banks don’t take kindly to US personal checks, he was to cash them out and then wire the money via Western Union to the warehouse in the Ukraine. If I had called the guy, I would have seen through this in an instant, right? But this person thought he was part of a “work at home” opportunity and had no problems with people randomly mailing him checks, which he’d turn around and launder . . . anyway. Because the right hand didn’t see what the left was doing, this was a rather clever scam. I sincerely doubt I’ll ever recoup that money.
Nonetheless, time marches on. But today I went to the school’s Heath Services and had to consider that I might have kidney stones. Later this afternoon, after missing all my classes, I threw out my back jogging up the stairs. It gave me the opportunity to spend all day on my back, on the couch in my suite, working on a blog. More later!
