A Near Miss

This house came with a grand old crystal chandelier in the dining room. I figure it to have been added in the 1930s, after the big fire that burned away the upper floor. The rooms in that dining room do not match. There is one double window, and one single. The single window is longer and closer to the baseboards than the double window. I wouldn't question this except all of these windows share the same wall. So I figure the staircase that went up to the now-gone second floor must have been in this part of the house. The longer single window may have been a door to the outside. Anyway, I digress.....

The chandelier is beautiful but it is not my style, doesn't match my southwestern dining room furniture, and beside, we brought with us the chandelier that we had custom made in Albuquerque, and wanted to hang it over our southwestern slate-top dining room table. But this old chandelier is so pretty and in such good shape, that we thought it would be a shame to just throw it out, or donate it to a charity box somewhere. We had the brilliant idea to sell it and try to get enough for it to pay for the electrician who came to exchange this old chandelier for our custom-made one. However, I had no idea how I would ship it anywhere, so we put it on Craiglist.

A few years back we had an old motorhome that we listed on Craigslist and sold without a lot of bother. And with Craigslist you can stay local, which meant there would be no figuring out how to ship the chandelier, we could just lightly box it and a buyer could pick it up from us. So with pictures snapped before the chandelier was taken down, I put a listing out on Craigslist. Nothing happened for a couple of weeks.

Then, someone contacted me and said she wanted to buy it. She claimed she was an invalid and couldn't come look in person, but was happy with the pictures on the listing, would send a check and then would have someone pick up the chandelier. Her email address appeared to be a local one. So, this sounded terrific. I was going to find the pretty chandelier a good home.

But the emails started to get weird. The spelling was bad, the grammar terrible. And the details of how she wanted to do the exchange sounded screwy. She wanted to pay extra for me to have the thing boxed, and once I got the check, she would arrange for pickup, yada yada, yada. I began to have doubts.

Night before last, the check came. It was for $1500 more than the price of the chandelier. I went back to the computer and re-read the last few messages. It seemed she was wanting me to pay the "moving company" she was going to send to pick up the fixture. And the check was a company check, with no names on it that matched the one of the emailer. The return address on the postal label also was different and not a match. I fired off an email asking several questions. And yesterday took the check to my bank to have them contact the bank on the check. The vice-president I talked to scanned the check over to their fraud department, and sure enough, the check was a fake, no such account number. The bank advised me to file a police report, which I did. The woman at the bank fraud department said, "Good catch. We have these things come through all the time, and the people really get taken."

I guess the whole scam was supposed to work on greed. A person gets a BIG check and thinks OH BOY, takes the thing to the bank and the scam is on. I find it all to be very scary. I sold on eBay for 12 years and never had anything like this happen. Last year I had to cancel a credit card because the number had been stolen off a card reader in a motel we stayed in, and had been being used online to buy a lot of stuff. It seems the internet has become the plaything of scam artists and crooks, and I find I am getting gun-shy. The pretty chandelier is going in a box and will be given to charity. I don't want to run an ad in the paper and have people coming to look, so charity seems the only alternative. At least I will have a little tax write-off.

Sigh!!!