Zoom Zoom! New Jalopies for the Crittergators!

In which the Crittergators end up with new vehicles, and I do not. . . .

When I was in Ebensburg a few days ago, I had the fabulous experience of shopping at the High Street Emporium. It's a place that's full of antiques and junk. Yes, a junk shop. But a wonderful one.

I bought a pair of old-fashioned salt and pepper shakers shaped like little jalopies, just the right size for the Crittergators to ride. On this day, we got them out and put them to use. (I had to strap the Crittergators on with museum putty, for safety's sake.) 

Zoom zoom! How exciting! 

Look out! We're going for a ride!

Our soundtrack song is Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs, with Fast Car.

~~~~~~

In other news, I'd like to take a minute to talk about Internet scams. On this day, one of my local friends - a nice lady I used to work with - made a posting about items for sale. A friend's father was going into assisted care and they needed to get rid of items such as vehicles, tables and chairs, stove, fridge, trailers, what-not. 

Among the items listed was a 2012 Honda Accord selling for $3000. She said she'd be out of town helping with the move, but a deposit would reserve any item and she would answer questions via direct message. Once she was back, in about a week, vehicles would be available for test driving, etc.

The car sounded too good to be true. But I had an interest in it, so I queried her as to the transmission, whether it had been wrecked, whether several dealer recall fixes had been handled. She answered that it was a V6 automatic, never wrecked, and yes, the airbag recalls had been addressed.

I brought it to my husband's attention and he said there was something we had not been told. The car was going for too good of a price, had too low miles, and looked in excellent condition (yes, there were photos of both the exterior and interior of the car).

But the wording of the ad bothered me. There was just something strange about some of it. And when my friend answered back, her spelling and punctuation were perfect, which had not been my experience with this friend before. There was also a bit of aggressiveness to the tone of her replies, pushing me to make a deposit to reserve the item of interest.

I went back to the original posting my friend had made, and attempted to make a comment on it, only to discover that comments were disabled on the posting. Nobody could say ANYthing on the posting itself. Hmm. That's weird.

I looked it up online and discovered that this is a variety of the "moving, gotta sell everything fast, send me $$ to reserve these items" Facebook scam. Of course, people (maybe even people like me) DO send money to reserve the items. They never receive anything in exchange, and it's often impossible to get the deposit $$ back.

I had seen such a thing only ONE time before. After my nephew Joseph died, someone took over his Facebook account and made such a posting, selling a bunch of stuff. Well, of course, that time I instantly KNEW it was a scam, because I knew that Joseph was dead, he wasn't selling ANYTHING these days. And so I got into it with the scammer. Hard core.

I exchanged some hostile messages with this person pretending to be my dead nephew. My responses came from a place of PAIN. I said some things. The long and the short of it was that I got BLOCKED by that person and now cannot see ANY of the photos and postings on Joseph's Facebook. This is a harsh loss for me, but a price I paid for calling out a scammer. I lost access to some precious memories of my nephew by these actions. I'm not sure what else I was supposed to do.

Anyway, back to the present. I screen-shotted the posting my friend had made (which included probably 30 photos of all of the STUFF that was for sale - here is a comparable posting I found on Facebook this morning) and made my OWN Facebook post telling everyone that my friend's posting was likely a scam. I tagged her in it. I told everyone NOT TO SEND ANY MONEY. I also reported the posting to be a scam on Facebook. I deleted the messages I had sent to the scammer asking questions.

By a few hours later, both the original posting she'd made AND my message tagging her and calling her out had been removed. End of story. So it was that the Crittergators got new vehicles, but I did not, LOL! Lesson of the day: be careful online, and if the deal looks TOO GOOD to be true, it probably is!