I called the credit card hotline as well and they confirmed that my bank told me the correct course of action. Also they will be retrieving the money.
In any case I guess this happened because I am too tired to make good decisions after the stress of the last month or so since Easter. If I was less exhausted I would not have neglected to check out things before the booking.
I was putting myself under pressure to get our vacation organized. That didn’t help. I can clearly see that I need that vacation though.
Ha, yeah. And when I bought Res Arcana from loopshopi.com I was only 5% suspicious. That 5% led me to dig a little, post purchase, and that’s when the suspicions snowballed.
I do wonder how much on ebay is stolen/fenced goods. I always feel a bit bad buying there.
I had forgotten just how draining train travel to and in London can be, especially on a hot day,
Nice cool machine room, but the new site is much more compact and there’s nowhere to sit.
All done, and in working hours at that. Then I went across the road to sit in Russell Square while I poked things and made sure they were all properly working, in case I needed to pop back in in a hurry.
Unless you’re buying from a reputable seller, with a physical location, just about everything new on ebay is stolen or fake. That’s particularly true of high value items and electronics, but just about everything is counterfeited these days. Amazon in the US isn’t much better, and in some ways is worse. Amazon considers everything with the same part number (ASIN, or whatever they call it) interchangable, so they’ll send you whatever one is best for them, regardless of who you’re buying it from, or who supplied that particular item. So even if you try to buy directly from Amazon, or the manufacturer, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get one that isn’t fake.
Last year, I got a box of fake Bic pens from Amazon. Box looked okay, but the contents were a hot mess. They are just clicky ballpoints, which you can use as a touchscreen stylus when retracted. (I use them for baseball, I score games on my phone, and use the pen part to take notes and change the lineup card.) The stylus didn’t work, but the ball point part was smoother than the real ones.
When I was buying a lot of used camera gear on eBay, a sense of what was stolen was easy to develop. A seller who keeps on selling sets of stuff from deceased relatives is being a bit too obvious.
I filled my travel mug with very hot coffee, put the lid on, and then opened the drinking valve. The coffee heated the air trapped in the mug, and as gay-lussac predicted, the pressure was went up. When I opened the valve, coffee was violently expelled into my face.
Clearly I need to drink coffee before drinking coffee.
update. TL;DR: it’s somewhat resolved and I almost feel like everything is legit.
After some rest I figured out that I couldn’t see the reservation on any of my attempts because I had tried to “log in with google” because I didn’t want to actually register.
But–and this reminds me of my various disastrous experiences with gamefound–they had already created an account with the email I used when making the booking which was NOT my gmail address but a specific travel address I have.
Later I made an account with that email and voilà there is the booking. so that was definitely an improvement.
Today, one of my non-technical friends whom I asked for help deciding a course of action suggested I use chatGPT to figure out a message to write to the host that a chat bot would answer differently than a human and that’s what I did.
About an hour later I got a decidedly human response from the host. so that’s good.
Then I figured out that the house was also listed on the german sister site which I have previously avoided like the plague because they are just terrible but they are legit. they have the same awful ratings on trustpilot which re-inforces the idea that it really depends on the host. now the house is listed there as booked for the week and it has very good ratings so my assumption is that I am not being scammed.
However, there remains some a bit of doubt in me and so I’ll wait another day or two, to decide what we’ll do. But I don’t want to be scamming the host myself … so I’ll probably write another message or so… just to make it a conversation. But I have a much better feeling now than I did yesterday.
Thanks everyone for listening to me
It does not change the fact that I am tired, exhausted and need that vacation. And that I (and everyone else) need to be vigilant about transactions on the internet. I’ve managed to avoid being scammed on the net up to now and I suppose that made me careless and caused the whole mess yesterday.
Both my friend and I noted that we encounter more and more instances where there are smaller or a little larger amounts of money that you have to chase down.
For her it was a few € she had to pay because her bank’s ATM was broken and she had to go get cash somewhere else and they promised to refund her the Gebühren… which turned out difficult.
I had to chase down a 20€ steam code I got as part of my compensation from work (don’t ask, German tax bonusses for employees are weird.) and I got a total of 6 codes and 1 of them didn’t work.
We overpayed both taxes and insurance on our now broken and no longer ours car… the state easily refunded the taxes to our bank account (yay!) however the insurance send us a cheque–obviously they are calculating that we will botch cashing that cheque.
She had quite a few bad experiences being scammed on Kleinanzeigen. So much so she now prefers to donate stuff instead.
Got home today after a week away to discover that TalkTalk have “accidentally” cancelled our internet service. They said it will take 14 days to reconnect and the tariff we were on isn’t available anymore so they’ll increase the price
