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Justice, eBay Style
A poster on Reddit recently divulged a tale of the time he listed tickets for a sporting event on eBay and had a buyer back out of a transaction at the last minute.
“I made a one-day listing and clearly stated that the tickets must be picked up in person within 24 hours (the game was the evening after the auction ended, so there wasn’t any time to ship the tickets),” Reddit user BadgerMatt wrote.
A woman won the auction for around $600 but when BadgerMatt attempted to contact her multiple times to organize the exchange, he got no response until the evening before the game, when he received a brief e-mail stating that she’d overbid and her husband wouldn’t let her buy the tickets.
When BadgerMatt attempted to explain to the woman that she was obligated to complete the purchase and hadn’t left him with enough time to resell the tickets, he was rebuffed.
“That’s not my problem,” she wrote. “It’s eBay, not a car dealership. I can back out if I want.”
That’s when BadgerMatt decided he had to take matters into his own hands.
“I created a new eBay account, ‘Payback’ we’ll call it, and sent her a message: ‘Hi there, I noticed you won an auction for 4 [sporting event] tickets. I meant to bid on these but couldn’t get to a computer. I wanted to take my son and dad and would be willing to give you $1,000 for the tickets. I imagine that you’ve already made plans to attend, but I figured it was worth a shot.’”
The bait was set and within minutes, she was hooked, telling Payback in a message that she’d part with the tickets for “$1,100, no less. I can meet you at the game if you agree. I need your phone number.”
After a phone call to confirm the details, the woman then e-mailed BadgerMatt at 11:45 p.m. to say she’d decided to buy the tickets.
However, she also told him he’d need to drive across the city to drop off the tickets that night at her home. Upon arrival, he asked her for an extra $20 for his troubles and she “literally threw 31 $20 bills at me. I counted them before handing over the tickets,” he wrote. “I said, ‘Thanks for the great transaction’ as she flipped me off while walking away.”
Fast forward to the following morning. The woman called Payback to set up the ticket exchange but soon realized things weren’t quite what they seemed.
“Payback said that he could no longer go to the game and wouldn’t be able to do the exchange,” BadgerMatt wrote. “She blew her f***ing top and I swear to God started speaking in tongues. Payback said, ‘Ma’am, this is eBay, not a car dealership’ and hung up.”
Click here to read the post on Reddit.com.