my experience:
unknown_bob posts in a thread saying something to the effect of- “anyone interested in testing a beta unit, private message me. this is not a joke.” i private messaged him to see what’s up out of pure curiosity. he actually messaged me back a couple of times, asking for more details about me, like where i was located, etc.
a couple of days later some comment pops up on the thread that it was all an april fools day joke and unknown_bob was playing a trick on everybody. i don’t think much more about it but then he private messages me again saying that he is a beta tester for the OP-Z and that TE has sold him his beta unit. he doesn’t like it for his workflow and wants to sell it and is wondering if i’m interested to buy it. again, for entertainment value mostly (to see where this was going and what the hell was going on), i said sure i’m interested, how much do you want and where are you located?
he responded saying the price was €470 plus shipping from germany. i thought this was kind of hilarious overall and said yeah i’ll cop for that price but send me tagged pictures and a video proving you have a working unit. i mean how far was this dude going to go!? already its pretty clear this was a total scam. up until this point he had been writing back to me immediately… including when i asked for tagged media of the unit. he said no problem, i’ll get you the photos and video right away. but then nothing from him for a few days. i thought the hoax was over but then a couple of days later he sends a tagged photo.
i didn’t look at the photo too closely, but it did look kind of way too nice somehow for a simple tagged photo of someone trying to sell a beta unit on the black market. all this time i documented everything to give my friend tobias at TE. after unknown_bob sent the photo, i asked for his email address to i could pay him… and he responded immediately saying he needed to be paid in bitcoin because he couldn’t legally sell the unit and he was afraid to give out his email address and get caught. i said i’d only pay PayPal on invoice. again he offered to help me pay him in bitcoin somehow but i insisted on his email address.
nothing happened for a couple of days but then i got a PayPal invoice… which said “for data recovery services. by paying this invoice you revoke any rights to a refund under any circumstances, etc. etc.” i checked up on the PayPal username and email and found it to be very suspicious. i wrote him and said i couldn’t pay an invoice without a real email, name, address, phone number, etc. and he responded saying he had asked his friend to make an anonymous invoice for him and that his friend had messed it up somehow. also i should add he was trying to sell in € but invoiced in USD which might give some clue that he wasn’t in germany at least. i thought it would be done but he did actually send another invoice, this time through some russian account.
i kept writing him but he stopped responding after i didn’t pay the russian invoice. i had a feeling he was passing around the tagged photo, fishing for others to pay him for the unit, seeing how many people he could scam. i posted the photo on instagram and a few people recognized it who he was also trying to play. to be honest i’m kind of shocked that anyone would go to this trouble to scam people… or, i guess that’s not surprising, its just a pretty niche genre for a scam, selling black market beta units of the OP-Z?? sure if he gets even 1 person to pay him its worth the time, but there has to be plenty of other scams out there which pay off much more. at any rate, thought i’d post my experiences here in case anyone was curious about it. so random, unknown_bob hustling like hell. and the biggest asshole i’ve ever seen in this community. fuck you unknown_bob!
took the chance…got fucked over.
