So you bought this USB-stick/paper weight thing pictured above as an SSD from the seller in that link you posted? WHY the hell does he still have a 100% rating?

Ah, I see. I guess at that price chances are indeed high that you'll receive something like that. Shall be interesting to see how this goes.

yep, we'll never know - ebay just asked me to open a request for a refund. no bolts for me, I guess.

yep, the wonderful world of chinese fakes. gotta give them credit for creativity and fun though - as I have found out in my recent quest for a cheap retro handheld console, the amount of fakeness they are able to cram into one device is just ridiculous. also, if I remember correctly, that external drive from the picture actually had some devilishly crafted custom firmware that reported the advertised hdd size to the os, and also looped large files in some way when copying so everything looked fine at the first glance. that's one quality fake right there, if you ask me.

anyway, pretty sure the scammer is now long gone with all the almost $70 he made by hacking that one account (that's most likely what happened), wonder how far will that get him.

so now I play the waiting game.

We've already tried.

No worries! I am PREPARED!

I met a hitchhiking cheese maker on Sardinia btw. Really nice guy. And at the end of the day he gifted us a huge self made cheese that he produced from his backpack. We joked about maggots hopefully not being part of it. Pietro was cool though. He lives in a self sustaining commune in an internet free valley near Bologna. Some real hippie shit.

So...did it not arrive or what?  Was it made of cardboard, bailing wire, and aluminum foil??

Personally I haven't had any real bad experiences with ebay themselves yet. I mostly use it as a buyer and there sure are many dodgy people using it but so far I don't have very much to complain about the platform itself.

It's pretty disgusting, though I don't know why exactly. The idea of eating insects or maggots (especially live ones) is probably too connected with death and decay in modern western culture. Though a visit to any large butchery should be worse.

considering my long history of eating various types of insect larvae in food by accident (and not really being disgusted too much), I'd have little problem trying it out - though I do have to say getting rid of the living maggots would be preferable.

as long as it tastes good, I'm game.

The key things for ebay:

Selling - Only allow Paypal or payment on pickup. Also only allow people with greater than zero feedback and who have done the account verrification to bid/purchase your items. Also require immediate payment. The reason for this is that some people like to create fake accounts then do false bids or purchases but then never pay for them. So your item is classed as "Sold" which likely gets your item out of the way so that their item on another account has greater likelihood to sell. Or their just trolling.

Buying - Only pay with Paypal. Via any other way you don't get seller protection and thus wont be able to get a refund if it turns out to be a dodgy seller. I had a case of that happen earlier in the year. He somehow disabled the Paypal payment option for his listing and only allowed bank transfer. I asked for his Paypal and he said he only accepted bank transfer. Payed the money and a day later he cancelled his account. Tried via Ebay to get the money but they refused to help. My bank did try to get it back, but then his bank account blocked that. Motto of this story - Only pay with Paypal.