November 2005

  • Etymology of an eBay Scam

    (or, “eBay ain’t what it used to be”)

    Like most other computer geeks, I signed up for an eBay account a few years ago, and did a bunch of casual buying and selling on eBay. At the time, eBay seemed like a wonderfully utopian idea: The evolution of a good old neighbourhood flea market with the far-reaching power of the Internet — and, for a while, it certainly was.

    But something has changed in the intervening few years. The ethically challenged among us have figured out that they have the potential to make fast and easy money by preying on the naive and unsuspecting.

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