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Timonium hamfest observation
Hey folks,
What is going on with the Russians selling obviously defective junk and representing it as first quality good merchandise?? Of course there are dubious characters at hamfests but this was just over the edge this year!! Stacks of CDR drives, Hard drives, all marked 'bad' somewhere on them and marked $5 each or in that area. When asked about the drives and not pointing out that it is already marked as 'bad' the guy replies in crappy english "I have not tested all of these but every one I tried has worked". So I go out and drag my laptop in and guess what??? Five out of five random drives I selected failed completely. Some didn't even spin up. Are these guys dumpster diving outside a factory repair center or is this the stuff we sent over to Russia to have disassembled for the recycle value? Well I also tried some RAM chips. Again, the very bags these things were in were marked 'Fails memory test'. The seller represented them as 'good pull outs'. They couldn't have been any worse if they had been struck by lightening. It is one thing to say to the buyer "I really don't know the condition, you're buying as-is", or "I haven't tested it, but if there is a problem you may choose a differant one until you find a good one". These guys were blatently misrepresenting garbage as good useable merchandise!!! We went through this with the Asian wave, then came the East Indian wave, now it's the former Soviet block ripoff artists. I didn't get any business cards from the guys but I wish I had. These jokers will kill hamfesting by causing folks to think it is nothing more than a ripoff field-day for the un-suspecting and I really think these less than reputable folks should be reported to the hamfest commities. Caveat Emptor is one thing, but this was just outright lies on the part of the seller. Pity those who are just starting out in this hobby and looking for a bargin and get scammed, buy foriegn nationals at that!! I did find some Ram for my laptop, a 6C5 vacuum tube, a 'point and shoot' temperature reading device, some doorknob capacitors, a 21 pin Cinch Jones male-female pair, and an external floppy drive for a Thinkpad. All these items were in perfect condition and the sellers (who were not Russian) were more than happy to demonstrate the first-rate quality of those items. Hats off to the rare breed of honest hamfester!!!! |
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