eBay Part 3: “There must be some misunderstanding (woo-oo-oo-ooooh!)”

Well, Trevor has pointed out that perhaps the situation wasn’t quite what I thought it was. He writes:

According to your first email... she wanted you to "refund the difference in the amount that I paid and the actual face value"... as in... 100-$70 = $30... Am I wrong on this one?

Upon reading this, I just about smacked my forehead. (I think it would have been clearer to me had she written, “The difference between the amount that I paid and the actual face value…” but I suppose I should have thought to ask first before immediately assuming she wanted the entire amount back.) I opted not to send the email I’d written up and posted into my previous entry but immediately wrote the following to her:

I do have a question. Are you just asking for a refund of the difference? The way it was worded, I thought you were asking for a full refund (the difference and the face value), and that's why I became suspicious. If this isn't the case, I will gladly refund the difference to you; it's only if you were trying to get the item for free that I would have a problem.

She wrote back and confirmed that she was indeed just asking for the difference, so I apologized for the misunderstanding and issued the ~$30 refund.

Despite this, though, I did discover something else. Out of curiosity, since the email address she’s been using to correspond with me is different than the one associated with her eBay account, I checked to see if there was an eBay account registered under that particular address. It turns out that there is one, but since I hadn’t done business with that particular account, it wouldn’t give me the user name. Still, it put me on the right track, and I decided to try an eBay user search using the first part of the email address (i.e., everything before the @). Sure enough, I found an account under that name with a location of Michigan that was no longer active. The last pieces of feedback for this member were mostly negative, as well, which leads me to believe that the account was suspended.

I contacted the people who left the feedback to see if they still had the email address associated with that account. I haven’t heard back from them yet, but I’d say that I’m 99% certain that it is her. This means she has a history of being dishonest, and I infer from that that this whole thing was planned all along. (After all, she wasn’t able to explain away the whole Minnesota thing.) I theorize that she knew she wouldn’t be able to find tickets for the show that wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg, so she played dumb and then exploited Michigan law to get the tickets for face value.

While I’m still miffed at her for being shady, it’s not as bad as I had previously thought it was. After all, it only means that I’d be out maybe a couple bucks for the service charge (since it wasn’t listed on the ticket and therefore not part of the face value). The extra $30 would just have been profit.

All this does make me wonder how I got a decent score on the reading comprehension portion of the ACT, though.

P.S.—Extra special thanks to Trevor for helping me out so much on this one.