Tuesday, 12/15

 Pull up a chair, kids, and I'll tell you the story of what it's like to be a cautionary tale.

A couple of weeks ago, Loraine was searching the web for a couple of soccer jerseys for some of her favorite players. Some are hard to find in the US, because (for some reason) the teams don't sell them to US residents. Anyway, she found a site, footballshirts.com, that would allow her to get everything she wanted.

So she ordered them.

We received a package from the company last week, and it didn't contain the jerseys she ordered. Oh, we now have a 2XL shirt from a bike racing team that hasn't existed for ten years, but not the three soccer jerseys. She sent them an email, but never heard back.

Then she went to another website, scamadviser.com, and found out that the company, which is based in Hong Kong, does this a lot. They are in no way reputable, and basically exist to separate people from their money. We can't figure out why they actually sent her the 10-year old bike shirt; maybe it's a loophole in Chinese law, or something, but Scam Adviser notes how what happened to Loraine has happened to other people over and over again.

She's bummed. But I'm not sure if what happened next happened to the other people.

Usually, when we buy something from some place we've never bought things from, we'll use my Pay Pal account. However, the Pay Pal button on the site wasn't working, so we just used my credit card. And because of that, I shouldn't have been surprised when, a few days later, I received a series of texts from my credit card company asking if I was purchasing several hundred dollars worth of stuff from Ali Baba, the Chinese version of Amazon.

Oops.

It only took a few hours of time that I really don't have, but after a series of phone calls that credit card was cancelled and I was issued a new one. I don't have to pay for the Ali Baba charge, but I do have to spend even more time I don't have changing numbers and dates on several auto-pay things for which I use my card. I'm usually so careful about stuff like this. I warn friends and family members about stuff like this. But for some reason this time around...

We blew it. Thankfully, no serious damage was done, aside from loss of time and whatever money we originally paid for the jerseys which we'll never see, but that's not the point. Despite everything I usually do and everything I usually espouse, we blew it.

So, to sum it up in the words of my grandfather—don't do as I do. Do as I say.

Trust me on that.

(jim@wmqt.com)