The scammer plagiarized eBay and Paypal’s email designs to try to get me to send the item I was selling all the way to Nigeria.

Here’s what happened. I put my iPod touch on eBay (because I got a new iPhone, yay!) on the 18th of August 2009, with no reserve and a starting price of £0.99. The auction would last 7 days. I monitored a couple of other similar iPods in the meantime to see what they were going for. I was expecting a final auction price of around £150.

As the auction took place, I got a few watchers and eventually a few bidders. As often on eBay, most of bidding occured towards the end of the auction. I got a couple of people to bid just above £100, then someone at £155, and then, someone at £815!!!

I thought, “hang on, who can be stupid enough to pay £815 for a used iPod when their retail price is around £200???”. The person’s username on eBay was “richard.carpentier”, which at first sounded like quite a generic name. I almost immediately got an email from this Richard Carpentier, asking me to transfer them my paypal details so they would be able to proceed with the payment.

I emailed this person through eBay, asking them whether they were a genuine buyer or a scammer. Never got a reply. What I got was a fake email from Paypal, stating that I’d received the funds on my Paypal account and should proceed with shipping the item. If you have a closer look at the image on the right, you’ll see that the email isn’t directly from Paypal, it’s from this “transactionsdetailcentre@europemail.com”… not quite Paypal, huh?

This Richard person (who I suspect is probably more a small organisation) was hoping that I wouldn’t log into my paypal account to verify the money had been sent properly. Instead, they hoped that I would just read this email, trust it, and, hang on, ship the iPod to Nigeria! Who buys iPods in Nigeria on eBay these days? None, from my experience!

Worst even, I got another fake email from eBay threatening me on a strike for the item, if I didn’t pay promptly! This was the best part f it. The design of the email was so convincing, anyone could have been scared and paid the money straight away. Although I must say being threatened usually gives me suspicions on the real intentions of the buyer.

This type of scam is pretty simple. The scammer hooks you by offering you a lot of money. They then use the technique of plagiarising the look and feel of the emails they will send to pretend they are genuine. They divert your attention by offering a very decent amount of money, whereas all they want is the item. You will never see the money in your account, but you’ll happily send them the item, if you don’t check your real account.

In this particular case the scam was quite obvious – no one would pay more than market value for an iPod on eBay! But what if their bid was just over the price for which I sold it for eventually? What if they’d put a bid on for £165, instead of £815? Then it would have been difficult to spot the scam. After all, what they get at the end of the day is just the value of the iPod, nothing else.

Bottom line is, if they’d thought things through, they could easily have scammed me. Luckily they were stupid enough not to! From now on I’ll be very careful with eBay and Paypal. If you’re reading this, you should also be very vigilant. Easy money online is usually fake money, at least that’s what I like to think!

I’ll cut to the chase, here are some of the top Apple secrets (at least for me) that are revealed in Inside Steve Jobs:

- The new interface for the Mas OS X was prototyped using Macromedia Director in just 3 weeks. Steve Jobs was so impressed he told the Senior Designer Ratzlaff he believed he had an IQ of over 100.

- Jobs went around Silicon Valley’s top design firms to come up with a new case for the Apple II, which refused to take stock in Apple for doing the work. Jobs gave the work to Jerry Manock, a freelance designer who’d left HP and needed work.

- Pixar, the famous animation studio, was created by Steve Jobs after he left Apple Computers in 1985. In 1995, Pixar released Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated 3D movie. Jobs sold Pixar to Disney in 2006 for the sum of $7.4 billion.

- At San Francisco’s Moscone Center, the Apple Booth is shrouded in a twenty-foot high black curtain. Everything inside the curtain is also wrapped, even the MacWorld Presentation stage. The building is protected 24/7 by guards. Google wants to keep its secrets until the last minute!

- At Apple, everyone is scared of losing their jobs. Steve Jobs is extremely demanding of the people that work for him. This constant state of fear is known as the “hero / asshole rollercoaster”. One day you’re a hero, the other you’re an asshole.

- In recent years, everytime a major product has been completed at Apple, Steve Jobs decides to generously give away one copy to each member of staff. This includes the iPod Shuffles to each employee and the complimentary iPhone in 2007 (21,600 iPhones given away on total).

- Apple employees say “like many people, I tried to avoid him as much as possible” about Steve Jobs. If you walk in front of Steve’s office, who knows what will happen to you, you might even get fired!

- Steve is a militant vegan. One employee even changes from his leather shoes to canvas sneakers to go meet Steve Jobs, as he would not tolerate any form of animal skin in his office.

- The Cube, a beautifully designed, technically advanced Mac G4 machine was one of Steve Job’s technological babies, which he launched in July 2001. It was the wrong machine at the wrong time and the first mistake of Apple’s CEO since he had joined the company. Steve Jobs was stung.

- [Quote from the book, p194] : When it comes to innovation, Jobs is fond of quoting Picasso’s famous dictum: good artists copy, great artists steal. To which Jobs adds: “And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas”.

That’s it! But there are lots more interesting facts about Apple and Steve Jobs in the book, so I highly recommend investing in a copy to find out more excitings insights on the company and its cofounder.