When buying things online, especially from places like Gumtree or Craigslist where you do not have buyer protection, as opposed to buying from eBay, you have to be careful lest you get scammed. Unfortunately one poor soul by the name of Edd Joseph in the UK got scammed when he attempted to purchase a PS3 from someone who posted the ad on Gumtree.
The console was priced at £80 and to make things worse, Edd paid the seller by direct bank deposit which pretty much offered no protection at all. He tried to complain to the police who told him that there was little chance of catching the crook, and Gumtree replied to him saying that bank transfers were against the site’s T&C to begin with. So what did Edd do? He got revenge.
According to Edd, “I was really annoyed and I was trying to think of ways of being more in the position of power because I felt so helpless about it. My first thought was that I could try and pretend I had found out where he lived but it was all a bit of a cliche and it wasn’t going to worry him really.”
He then devised a plan which involved spamming the seller with text messages and these aren’t your regular text messages. Nope, Edd decided to spam the seller with plays from Shakespeare. So far Edd has sent the scammer 22 players which include Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello which amounted to about 17,424 texts in total which costs him nothing as he is on O2’s unlimited text and calls package.
Naturally the scammer isn’t too pleased about it and has been trying to contact Edd by calling him and abusing him on the phone, although that did nothing to stop the texts from pinging his phone all day and night. We’re not sure if Edd is hoping to get compensated or refunded by the scammer, but according to him, “I’m going to keep doing it. If nothing else I’m sharing a little bit of culture with someone who probably doesn’t have much experience of it.”
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