Bid adieu for the next 14 months to Robert J. Guest, 31, of Blue Jay, Calif., who got that federal jail sentence for bilking $37,000 out of eBay Internet auction bidders by telling multiple parties they had the winning bids for Sony digital cameras and other stuff, and then billing their credit cards or cashing their checks without delivering a thing.
The rip-offs date back to 1998 and safeguards have been added to eBay since, but it still boils down to sending your credit card number to somebody you’ve never heard of for something you haven’t seen.
HOLDING ECROOKS AT EBAY
THROW THIS BOOK AT THEM
With the blessings of eBay Inc.’s founding light, Pierre Omidyar, comes “The Official eBay Guide to Buying, Selling and Collecting Just About Anything” (Fireside Books, $13), loaded with pointers about surfing the huge variety of items ranging from Beanie Babies to boxcars up for bid at www.ebay.com.
Authors Laura Fisher Kaiser and Michael Kaiser devote a dozen well-crafted pages to avoiding shills, false bids, extortion and other pitfalls of Internet auctions. Buy it safely at amazon.com and digest the rules of the road before risking a single ebuck on eBay.
CUBE SPACE CONCERTO
NETRADIO.SCAM
The boss will think you’re madly busy transcribing tapes while you’re actually playing crystal-clear audio tunes at your work station thanks to a splendid remodeling at the www.netradio.com Web site. It’s now far easier to get music on the sly than messing with RealAudio and hunting down individual net-enabled radio stations.
Execs at NetRadio.com (Nasdaq: NETR) say peak traffic comes in between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. weekdays as working stiffs fill those long hours between showing up and finishing up for the day. With 120 channels of just about any kind of music you can name, the Web site plays very smoothly over telephone modems and keeps audio advertising to a minimum.
Check it out. It beats working.
FOR WANT OF A NAIL
A PRICE WAR WAS LOST
Dire rumblings at Dell Computer Corp., known for past genius at “just-in-time inventory” where computers are built from a parts inventory that turns over every day. With looming concerns that certain computer components will become scarce in the wake of turmoil in Taiwan, Dell execs are warning that a crunch could hurt financial results. If you have all the parts to build a computer except memory chips, your just-in-time inventory becomes just about worthless.
Y2KORNER
Retail analysts can hardly conceal their glee at recent projections that the average American family will keep $1,000 in cash on hand during December as a Y2K precaution. Look for a nationwide spending spree of Y2Kash early next year.
