Sorry, I’ve been sitting on this one too long, and I just have to post it.
This is the Judge Judy episode where the eBay scammer gets her due… to the tune of a $5000 judgement. More importantly, she gets taken to task for even pretending that this was OK or justified.
Premise: The defendant sold two expensive cell phones to the plaintiff, but then only shipped them pictures of the cell phones, claiming the listing was only for the photo, not the cell phone. When the buyer complained, she left them negative feedback claiming they were the scam artists! Sleazy.
Look, I know Judge Judy is no Rob Chesnut, but then again, Rob Chesnut is no Judge Judy. 🙂
I admit to having a soft spot for these type of shows… call it a weakness. But I admit a strong desire to see the few bad actors out there who make the world a worse place get some public humiliation.
Of course, if these buyers had purchased the cell phones on eBay Express, they would have been covered by 100% buyer protection, and they would have gotten their money back quickly. Still, that wouldn’t have been as much fun as this TV clip.
Psychohistory 
That would be Rob Chesnut (no T in the middle) 🙂
I fixed it… I’ve been misspelling that for years. Ironically, I actually Googled it to get the right spelling, and Oprah’s website had the clip about his guest appearance. I guess she spelled it wrong too…
Adam
Thank you for posting that clip. I’ve seen Judge Judy pissed off before, but maybe never as much so as in that case. The courtroom audience was totally with her too.
Was there any mention of the word ‘oxymoron’ ?
I never could get the hang of that word, but I think it applies to “eBay Trust & Safety”
Here is another article covering this ridiculous scam at http://blog.swoda.com/blog/2007/05/scam_of_the_mon.html
Catharsis, thy name is Judge Judy.
Irony, thy name is watching illegally posted clips of a court show. 🙂
Has anyone ever tried to report an ebay scam? I collect paper money, and saw a national banknote for sale on ebay in July. After looking a bit closer, I noticed the note pictured and described was the same one I bought on Ebay in December of last year. It was the same serial #, plate letter and even had the same stain in the margin. The seller had listed a few pieces of paper money, all were buy it now auctions that ended less than 30 minutes after listing. No paypal, just personal checks (to be held for 10 days) or WIRE TRANSFER. The buyer left feedback the next day, which really struck me as odd. I reported this to ebay four times and each time the response was an automatically generated one which stated nothing fraudulent was found. I finally gave up but it is still bothering me. Has anyone else been in the same boat?