Caveat emptor

A weekly airdrop of Exchange & Mart was the luxury I used to think I’d choose when the producers of Desert Island Discs realised who they’d been missing all these years.

A weekly airdrop of Exchange & Mart was the luxury I used to think I’d choose when the producers of Desert Island Discs realised who they’d been missing all these years. But now, I fear, it would be access to eBay, that wonderful source of 24-hour auto-porn, plus everything else. Just to browse — I’d have nothing to bid with, of course, though that needn’t stop me.

Wonderful though eBay is, it should be negotiated with care. Not only is there always something you persuade yourself you need, when you don’t, but you can also fall victim to desert-island dwellers who mischievously run up the auction prices for eventual buyers. I nearly lost a pair of church pews like that but fortunately the pretender was exposed and the pews eventually came home in the horse box. More seriously, you can fall victim to scams, as a friend did recently.

He is an authority on a certain breed of classic car, which I won’t name because there’s a police investigation. The advert was well written, the photos convincing, the price good. Questions emailed to the seller were satisfactorily answered, my friend checked out the seller’s Facebook page and agreed to buy (this wasn’t an auction). He paid the money into an escrow account and drove with his trailer from Sussex to Lincolnshire to pick up his beauty. What he found there was a dilapidated empty house; a quick call established that his money had already left the escrow account.

Indeed, the escrow account had left, too. It wasn’t real, though the car was real and living in Hampshire, the advert was real, even the Facebook page was real — for the real seller who really existed.