I needed a new charger for my cell phone but didn't want to pay $20 in a local store, so I went online and found an original through a reputable third party merchant for only a few dollars. I bought three of them, and then I bought two more batteries for my phone since they die over the course of a random day. Well, it turns out that the chargers are all counterfeit and take about six hours to charge my phone when the original one only took about two hours. It would cost more to send them back then I paid. So I, a guy who considers himself too crafty to get ripped off online, am now sitting on three chargers I know don't work very well and two batteries that came from who knows where. I suppose it's a good reminder that the Internet is in many ways still the Wild West, where rules are flexible and deception is easy. I always thought that if I lived back in the real Wild West I'd find some industrious way to make money, but it turns out that I would have been ripped off with fool's gold just like everyone else.
No comments:
Post a Comment