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I was dumb too
Back at the beginning of August or thereabouts, I heard of these people, and thought it too good to be true. I tried to find info about them and found none so thought I'd try a small order. But then I got "greedy" and put a lot of stuff on eBay, and started collecting money.
I sent a bank check (for $4K plus) to the GoldChange place in SC for Mr. Manning. But then the next day someone sent me some info indicating it was a scam. I contacted John Eichin at GoldChange and asked him to not credit Mr. Manning's account, but to send my money back or the check if not yet cashed. After a few days I got an email reply back that he had cashed the check but not yet "spent" the funds to Mr. Manning's account. I asked him to send me the money back ASAP by FedEx and I would cover his costs of FedEx-ing it. At first he spoke of charging some sort of handling fee, but in the end, at the end of August, FedEx delivered an overnight letter with a cashier's check in it for the complete amount I had sent. So the GoldChange guy/people were honest. I emailed him and asked him to send me an invoice for the FedEx, since he seemed to be an innocent caught in the middle of this, and I never heard from him again. So he ate the FedEx cost it seems.
It did take a few weeks in the end before I got the money back (Mr Eichin indicated he was wanting to make sure I was not running a scam on him stopping payment etc), but I did get it back.
The whole thing did cost me a couple hundred dollars, since I reimbursed all the people who sent me money, including their costs (money order fees, overnight fees since many overnighted money to me, etc) (the costs I reimbursed is what cost me the money, obviously not the original payment that I reimbursed), certified mail costs for the reimbursements, a ton of eBay listing fees (eBay did cancel all my final value fees and refund that after a month but Yahoo wouldn't cancel my final value fee and I had to do a chargeback through Amex to Yahoo -- stay away from them, their auction rules suck), etc. But I did get out of it with only the embarassment and the 1-200$ in fees and reimbursement costs, postage, etc. I also got several positive eBay feedbacks from customers who appreciated how I handled it after realizing I couldn't fulfill anything.
This was a clever scam, since there ARE companies who deal in liquidated merchandise, and it was about time for Apple to introduce new computers, therefore dumping old inventory into the liquidator market, who turn it over fast for a couple of % profit (high volume low margin).
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