Due Diligence Pays Off
By Casey Wilson, East Sierra Branch
Everybody has heard the saying, “If it seems too good to be true…..yadda, yadda.” While I’m not a tightwad, I’m more often than not careful about spending. Last week, I sort of blanked out on the “…too good…” cliché while shopping around for a used iPhone.
A guy, Q. B. let’s call him, offered an iPhone 6S on Facebook Marketplace for $75 – about 40% of the average market value. I swapped a couple of messages back and forth and set a time and place to close the deal. I was lucky. Fate intervened. I waited at the meeting place and time for 30 minutes and then posted him a message asking if he was coming. His roommate posted back that Q. B. had been arrested that morning. Huh. No explanation offered.
By the time Q. B. posted me the next morning (perhaps out on bail) to reset the deal, I had done due diligence that I should have done that the day before. I asked him to send me the IMEI# from the phone.
According to advice I gained from, where else, the Internet, if a seller can’t, or won’t, provide that number, the odds are great that the instrument is stolen property. Except for authorized businesses, only the true owner of the phone can access the information. And even the businesses must have the phone in hand to do the trick.
Well, you can guess the rest. Q. B. did not respond to my request. He didn’t respond at all. In fact, he closed his Marketplace account and disappeared. I tried searching for him with no success. Q. B. was probably an alias because the name didn’t show in police or sheriff logs
So, if it’s too good to be true, then it probably is….
Widely published journalist, essayist, and photographer,
Casey Wilson is a past president of the California Writers Club.