I, A College Educated Millennial, Got Got By A Sketchy Internet Watch Scam

Dent7 years ago

The Internet is like the world’s largest superstore. You can find anything if you venture down the right aisle: exotic animals, weirdly real sex dolls (or so I’ve heard), weed mailed directly to your fucking doorstep…LITERALLY ANYTHING. The virtual marketplace has been good to your boy, and I’ve never had a problem with it. So pardon me for having a little trust in the internet when confronted with something that was probably too good to be true.

There are a lot of people to blame for this blind belief in the Internet. For starters, I’d like to say fuck Mark Zuckerberg. None of this would have happened if he hadn’t ever stolen invented Facebook. I’m not actively searching for sketchy places to spend money but when they pop up as advertisements PROMOTED by Facebook themselves, I tend to accept that endorsement. That’s a trusted source in my book.

I was just minding my own business trying to feel better about myself reading the statuses of the winners I crossed paths with in high school when this ad catches my eye. It’s a watch company that is giving away FREE watches. What a deal! All I had to do was pay for the shipping, and a $200 watch could be mine.

Generally, I am pretty suspect of any companies that tells me they are just going to willingly hand something over for free, but this piqued my interest. Plus, since I was paying the shipping, it wasn’t technically free so maybe it was legit. I decide to click on their “about us” tab for more information.

These guys literally have a, “How is this not a scam?” section. They go on to explain how they are trying to create brand awareness for these amazing watches. If I get one for free, then I will surely tell all of my friends about how great it is. They will tell their friends, and this company goes on to make a trillion dollars. We both win!

At this point, you’re probably starting to form the opinion that I’m a total idiot, and I agree with that. Any company that has a page specifically designed to tell all about how not fraudulent they are is definitely a scam. Nevertheless, I was somehow convinced that this was a legitimate place of commerce. With shipping only being a minuscule $13 compared to the hundreds of dollars that the watch would cost — who wouldn’t take that deal?

I ordered three.

It didn’t take long after purchasing for me to realize the infraction that I had just committed. More and more advertisements kept popping up with this same exact deal, but they were all different companies from the one that I had purchased from. They even were selling the exact same watches. Still I found a way to convince myself that I was not in error. None of these other sites even tried to defend themselves against being a scam. Maybe all of these are the copycats, and I had ordered from the one, true, honorable site.

I got got.

Jump ahead a month, and my watches arrived yesterday. Honestly, I would have felt better if they had just not sent anything at all. To put it plainly, I could have gotten the same quality out of a dime store vending machine. They’re so cheap that I would roughly put the cost of production at around a dollar each, total trash. In a fit of rage over my own ignorance, I threw them away almost immediately upon arrival.

Now, I could bitch and moan about how the Internet is dangerous, and it’s not fair that there are people out there manipulating feeble minds like myself. I could put this “company” and others in its genre on blast over their shady business practices, but I’m not doing that either. At the end of the day, you have just be a logical person. You have to have a little bit of feel about where you are spending your money. So with a deficiency of a whole $39 in my bank account, I have one final thing to say.

Keep your head on a swivel when you fire up the ol’ Internet machine. .