Destination: Kim's House

Our friends Bethnie and Goldlin took their 4 year old daughter out for pizza last night and the restaurant had kids' coloring menus with a map on the top asking, "If I could go anywhere in the world, I would go to..." Goldlin asked their daughter where she would go if she could go ANYWHERE at all, and she responded emphatically, "Kim's House!" Goldlin was thinking Hawaii, tropical paradise, maybe even Grandma's, but his daughter was adamant that Kim's House is the place to be. It feels good to be loved by a 4 year old!

Thoughts on the holiday

For those who don't know, Owen and I have always been indifferent to Valentine's day. We don't like the sales-based hallmark holiday demanding our lunch money, and both of us feel it is more important to love each other every day rather than go all out one day a year. I found this article, which I felt described our perspective quite well.


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100627702

Buyer Beware

Most of you know I'm a frequenter of craigslist and ebay. On craigslist I came across my dream horse trailer (3 horse slant, aluminum, warmblood size (taller trailer), with NICE living quarters). The seller wanted to go through ebay to protect us both. Owen and I assessed our finances and decided this was an incredible deal we couldn't pass up. Many emails later to "Mary" we were given a link to a site that turned out not to be affiliated with ebay.

Owen went to whois.net and looked up the domain name to find it was registered not to ebay, but to someone named Rajesh . Here is Owen's list of things we noticed that raised the red flag to the scam:

1. The asking price was about 1/10th what it should have been (hence it was in our price range)
2. It was a used trailer, but all of the pictures made it look brand new.
3. The seller had a sob story about how her husband had died in Iraq a few months earlier, and when we requested to talk to her on the phone, she told us she had just had ear surgery and couldn't talk on the phone. (All of these stories help make it believeable that the trailer was being sold for so little.)
4. When we decided to buy the trailer, the seller sent us a link to the ebay page to make the purchase. It was one of those "click here" links. These are classic tools of scams. It would have been more appropriate, since we were supposed to be using ebay for the purchase, for the seller to send us an item number that would could use on the ebay site to find the trailer.
5. Since Kim uses ebay frequently, she is automatically logged in to ebay. This means if you send her a link on ebay for something and she clicks on it, she will see her username when the link comes up. The link the seller sent us, however, did not have her automatically logged in. There was a link to sign in, but it didn't actually do anything.
6. The link took us to an ebay-looking site. However, it wasn't a site that had ebay.com in the address. So, I decided to do some investigative work. I went to the site whois.net. This site will tell you the name of whoever owns a given domain name. ebay.com is a domain name. I put ebay.com in, and it return information about ebay, mailing address, etc. I then put in the domain name from the link the seller sent us, and it wasn't registered to ebay. It was registered to some individual.
7. Just for fun, we clicked on the "buy now" button. It took us to a page that looked like an ebay login page intented for purchases. Below the login box, it stated "Protect your account: Check that the Web address in your browser starts with http://MotorTransactionsVPP.com/." It didn't. It started with http://vppmotortransactiononline.com. Apparantly the scammer missed that.
8. The web page has an item number. We tried to use that item number on ebay, but it came up empty.
9. Every time Kim emailed the seller, she replied immediately. After receiving the link, we replied asking for a legit ebay page or item number. We still haven't heard back.
   

Here are some other things we found on the web page that don't add up.

1. If you click on the seller's profile, it lists a bunch of other people who have rated the seller. If you click on these people's profiles, you get sent to the ebay site, not the persons profile.
2. The web page says that this is a 10 day listing and ends February 9, 2009. However, it also says that the starting time was on November 29, 2008.
3. If you go to a valid ebay site, you can always click the ebay logo and it will take you to ebay.com. The web page sent to us doesn't do this.
4. We thought this was pretty funny too - from the web page

This is the exact opposite of real market place safety tips. Also, this picture is named omg.gif. For those of you who don't know, "omg" is used by kids while text messaging. It means "Oh my gosh(edited by us)!". We thought it was funny, as in "Oh my gosh! If anybody believes this, it will be a miracle!"

I went to ebay, and here is the real listing of marketplace safety tips.



Here's the webpage the seller sent us. Have fun finding more things wrong with it. Link

Don't worry. We caught all of these things before we made the purchase. So, no money lost.

Kim's new website

We finally got Kim's website up for her business. Go ahead and check it out -- http://www.bitofhoneytraining.com. I spent some time while I was on disability putting things together and tweaking it. I think it looks pretty good.