The Love of What Money Can Buy

"Hey, I didn’t know this is the car you drove!” That was Joe’s greeting when he spied me from across the parking lot at church the other day. “Wow, you are a humble guy,” he said in mock reverence. This, from a guy on a bicycle who doesn’t own a car himself. We had a good laugh at my expense, but it got me thinking.

Well, it may be time for a new car, but I haven’t quite decided yet. On the one hand I don’t need one and I’m sure I can put the money to better use. Besides, I don’t actually have the money at the moment, though I anticipate I will within the next six months or so. Also my venerable little truck, despite pushing 200K miles, has no mechanical problems to speak of. Truth be told, there’s just about nothing I couldn’t fix on it so I could, in theory, keep this truck going indefinitely.

On the other hand, this little beastie is showing its age. Check out the pictures. Need I say more? Besides, my kid sister is soon approaching driving age and I need to think about how to get her into a car. For better or worse that task is going to fall on her siblings. Unfortunately, this little truck is probably a poor choice for a hand-me-down for any number of reasons, including its manual transmission.

Here’s another input to the calculus: I’m smitten with the little Mazda roadster that was the subject of the last few posts (here, here and here). I've never been much into cars, but I kind of regret not getting my little BMW Z3 roadster way back when I was seriously considering it. It wouldn’t be the prudent thing, I’d said to myself--much the same sort of thing I’m saying to myself now. Even though it turned out to be a great decision to buy my little truck when everyone said I was nuts for buying a two-seater, this might this may be the last time I can justify a little two-seater.

Well, I have some time yet to decide. I’ll revisit in a couple months. Maybe a better use for the money will come up in the interim.

Location location location

You are a business that, like every business, is in the business of making money. You can locate your offices anywhere you like; money is no object to you. Here are your choices: 1) anywhere else, or 2) this one particular place that is crowded, looks bad, smells bad, is exceedingly expensive, has traffic is so bad that nobody--neither your employees nor clients--wants to commute there, your employees have to park several blocks away and for a monthly fee, the surrounding streets are so dangerous your employees are afraid to walk to their cars after dark and so they use a shuttle instead (whose cost is invariably passed on to the employer/employee), there’s nowhere for your employees to grab a late lunch or dinner after 4pm because the place turns into a ghost town, your employees don’t want to live nearby and couldn’t afford to pay the premium to live nearby despite this place being a dump. Oh, this place does have one arguably redeeming feature: other similarly-situated businesses are clamoring to move in so there’s a bit of caché that comes with locating your offices here.

If it was your business where would you locate? It’s pretty obvious isn’t it? And you still think so-called urban sprawl (live where you work and work where you live) is a bad thing? This is a discussion for another day, but detractors of "urban sprawl," I think, operate under a misguided idealism that old cities--these bastions of culture and the epitome of civilization--ought to be the center of our lives, literally. Ya right. Tell that to families who live in a nice planned community with nice new schools and a local town center that just opened up.

Incidentally, the place I describe above is downtown Los Angeles.

New and Fresh

Says my oh-so-helpful junkmail from Yahoo's on-line dating service, "New women, fresh possibilities...." By implication, it seems that until now all the women were old and starting to smell. Who are the ad wizzrds that came up with that one (bonus points if you catch the SNL reference)?

Not True

I already knew it was too good to be true; I was hoping it was too good not to be true. After all, a scammer wouldn't offer such an unreasonably low price for fear of raising a suspicion of fraud, right? Said the scammer, “[T]he car is priced as cheap as it used to belong to my brother and unfortunately he is no longer among us as he had a motorcycle accident.” At this point I fairly well knew it was a scam, but I wanted to see where this would go just in case it was real. He said he’d use Ebay and their escrow service which offers all sorts of buyer protection. It does, but when I then received two spoofed emails purportedly from Ebay it was clear this was an off-Ebay transaction and the money was going not to an escrow service, but being wired directly to an individual. The spoofed emails were very convincing for the uninitiated and I can see how easy it is for people to get scammed. There were other tip-offs as well, but still hoping against hope, I replied with the following email even though I knew I was talking to a scammer.

I have every intention of completing this transaction, but there are several aspects of the proposed transaction that raise security red flags. If we can resolve them I will send payment, but otherwise I cannot.

You are asking me to wire money directly to an individual, not an escrow company and certainly not Ebay's only approved escrow agent Escrow.com http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/accepted-payments-policy.html.

These escrow companies typically do not send payment instructions via email to discourage spoofed emails and fraud: https://escrow.com/FraudWatch.asp

This appears to be an off-Ebay transaction since I have no listing information or confirmation that I am a bidder for that listing. Also, a member search on Ebay returns "The email address [scammer's email address] is used by a valid eBay member with a feedback score of 0 (0% positive). We have not found a transaction between you and this member in the last 60 days."

All the contact links, including Customer Support, in the Ebay emails I received go to a domain registered by a New York individual and not to an Ebay-registered domain and apparently not to Ebay's Customer Support which is reached through a web-based form and not an email address: http://ebay-us.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/ebay_us.cfg/php/enduser/ask.php

For my protection I can only complete the transaction through a verifiable Ebay transaction and using Ebay's approved escrow agent. This is the usal manner for these transactions. Please consider doing it this way. Otherwise, I'm afraid the emails I received look like spoofs and I cannot complete the transaction as currently proposed.

Becoming True

Ok, so the guy wrote back. He's doing the transaction through Ebay's escrow service and promises an invoice tomorrow. He says the car's cheap because it belonged to his now-dead brother and it brings back bad memories. I know, the sob story is de regur for scammers. Well, I'm all loaded up with all sorts of tips for spotting escrow scammers on Ebay and I've never been scammed yet. I'm willing to play this out a little on the off chance this is for real. I will either get spectacularly scammed or this will be the deal of the century. If it's the former then I'm sure I'll be so embarrassed that I'll go back and remove these posts!

Be True

I want it to be true so bad. It’s not even about the car; before last night I had no interest in getting another car. It’s that delicious fantasy of getting more back than you put in, like that dream where you put a quarter in the vending machine and it spits out two and then you do it over and over again.

The Mazda Miata has come a long way so I wasn’t surprised when, just for kicks, I looked at for-sale ads and found they are not terribly inexpensive. I’ve been thinking about getting a “project” car to fix and resell so I sorted the listings by price. I found a beautiful 2006 Miata in perfect shape with about 4k miles with an asking price of $3700! I’ve been emailing and calling the seller to verify whether the price is a typo, but I’ve not heard anything back. I’m ready to take the train 115 miles out to pick up the car, but what are the chances this ad is legit? He won’t be calling back, will he?