Kaye's Days

Some time ago, the art bug bit me and I started being pulled toward wanting to draw again. I draw very, very scarcely because I don’t like most of my drawings, and drawing itself felt very tedious with what I had. So, I had the idea to get a graphics tablet, a kind of tablet specifically made for artwork. Only problem was my naïveté rose its gullible head.

At first, I was hooked on getting a tablet called a Wacom Cintiq 13HD because not only is it generally believed tablet artwork is always better than mouse-created artwork, but Wacom is akin to Apple when it comes to graphics tablets. A lot of artists insist nothing compares to Wacom, and the huge prices (the one I linked costs $800 from its retailer) are worth it. However, for $800, I could buy a desktop computer, so I didn’t exactly want to spend that amount of money on something I was only going to use for one purpose.

Amazon had a list of third-party sellers who I thought had it on offer for much less. Notice I said “thought”. I’ve had Amazon since 2008 and while I wasn’t exactly a regular buyer of theirs (mostly because I didn’t have my own bank card until 2012, when I was finally 18), I never had any trouble with them, so I thought nothing of it. I quickly learned there’s a different between buying from Amazon and buying through Amazon.

I bought from a seller who’d “just launched”. Turned out to be fraudulent.  Not only did the item never come, but it never even shipped. I’ve had orders where there was no shipping info and the item still arrived on time, but in this case, the seller couldn’t even be reached. Amazon cancelled my order and I got the money back. I thought maybe that was one bad seller, so I tried with another “just launched” seller who had the Wacom Cintiq tablet for even lower than the first did. This one got exposed even faster as a scam, as the seller’s profile vanished. Interestingly, it reappeared days later after I’d called customer service to have that order cancelled. I’m currently waiting for the pending transaction to clear, so the money is available to me again. I even went to my bank to be certain and they assured me since it’s pending, the money is still there, and the transaction will clear since Amazon cancelled the order and didn’t charge me, as charges, unlike refunds, are immediate.

You can imagine how much I kicked myself. I went on DeviantArt and asked for some alternatives. A very helpful user led me to a journal she made that detailed Wacom tablets, as well as alternatives to the expensive brand. She told me it’s likely those who insist Wacom is the absolute best say so because it’s the only one they’ve ever used. It’s no surprise I became so persistent in trying to get a Wacom tablet when it’s the one praised to high heaven, despite not having much more overall than the others. In the end, I settled on getting a tablet called an XP-Pen Artist 10S, which cost $300. Since it was eligible for free same-day shipping, I opted for that and, to my surprise, it worked! I ordered it at 11am and it was delivered to my door at 7:20pm that very day. It works wonderfully!

I wish I could say that’s where this story ends, but it’s not. To help with the cost of purchasing the graphics tablet, I tried to sell my iPad, since I no longer use it. Now, I’m not so naïve, I believe every buyer is genuine, but I still ended up almost falling for a scam because it was one I’d never heard of. Basically, if there’s any mention of shipping agents, cashier’s checks, wiring extra money back, or shipping to any place besides the buyer’s location (especially outside of the country), pass! I actually busted one scammer on my own, and he tried very hard to convince me he wasn’t a liar, giving every excuse in the book and changing his story a dozen times.

On to the scammer I was fooled by. This person wanted me to ship it to Texas as a gift for a family member of his, and since Texas isn’t international, I didn’t find it strange. He wanted to make the payment through Paypal, a service I’ve used for years and found trustworthy (though not so trustworthy, I’ll give it my social security number!), so I agreed. He even sent me what seemed like an official email from Paypal that the payment had been sent through, so I was ready to ship my iPad. I took it to the post office, boxed it up, and paid for it to be shipped. After I submitted a picture of the tracking number, as asked in the first email, I later got a confirmation one. I thought everything was fine.

It wasn’t until I was on my way back home I realized everything was not fine at all. I read over the emails and this time, I took notice of the email address. It was from Yahoo. That was weird to me. Why would Paypal use a Yahoo account? I searched for it myself and found something interesting on Paypal’s help page. Paypal always addresses customers in their emails by their names. The scammer’s emails addressed me by the name on my Google account, which is a nickname, but I use my real name on Paypal. On top of that, there was no pending transaction for the payment. I called their customer service and after I described the emails, the representative told me those emails were not from them and suggested I return to the post office. I couldn’t go back right then, so I called the post office and asked them to hold my package for two days, when I’d be able to come back for it. Thankfully, they did. In the end, all I lost was the $11.28 I paid for the shipping since that was non-refundable, but I didn’t care. That was a very small loss compared to losing my iPad. Just because I didn’t want it anymore didn’t mean I wanted to be scammed out of it.

When the scammer contacted me again, I furiously and unkindly told him to go away, explaining I caught him in his lie. He said it was a third-party Paypal service exclusive to Texas that people used because Paypal was too much of a pain to bother with. Even if that had a slight amount of plausibility, why wouldn’t the customer service representative have told me that? Paypal’s employees don’t know about another Paypal branch?

In the end, I learned two things. Only buy expensive items from Amazon, and buyers are terrible. Every buyer I had for my iPad was a scammer, and I tried on three sites: Craiglist, Facebook marketplace, and LetGo. I suppose I should consider myself fortunate in that I didn’t lose any money with the third-party sellers. I’ve heard Amazon, though they’re not perfect, has a reputation for not fooling around when it comes to scammers, and with how quickly they got those investigations done, I can believe it. But I can only imagine they think they have an idiot for a customer. I don’t blame them.