sliderider wrote:

http://cgi.ebay.com/extremely-rare-toshiba-t1 … t=Laptops_Nov05

There ya go. 🤣

🤣

I've been seeing a lot of strange auctions like that... absurd prices for random old (and newer) computer parts, from sellers with little or no feedback, and the bidders always have little or no feedback. Best I can figure is that they're trying to use the auctions to cover up some shady transactions of some sort.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

I've been seeing a lot of strange auctions like that... absurd prices for random old (and newer) computer parts, from sellers with little or no feedback, and the bidders always have little or no feedback. Best I can figure is that they're trying to use the auctions to cover up some shady transactions of some sort.

The new Nigerian way?

🤣

It doesn't make sense though, if you're laundering money you would want to do thousands of small transactions, not a single immense one. Maybe it's like that scene in "Office Space" where the nerds have to look up money laundering in the dictionary. Ha ha.

No, it doesn't make a lot of sense, maybe not money laundering, but I'm not well enough versed in back-door dealings to know exactly what they're playing at. In any case, there's gotta be something sketchy going on... I can't think of any other reason why a Toshiba 486 would be priced at $500k, or a broken 8800GTS would sell for $50k (which I saw a couple weeks ago).

Well you know it's a big world and there are a number of curious folk among us. 😁

catatonic wrote:

It doesn't make sense though, if you're laundering money you would want to do thousands of small transactions, not a single immense one. Maybe it's like that scene in "Office Space" where the nerds have to look up money laundering in the dictionary. Ha ha.

I saw a guy trying to flog a 1000oz (yes that's one THOUSAND) block of platinum on ebay once. Needless to say the asking price was more than the GDP of some of the smaller countries on earth. He claimed he took it in part exchange in a real estate transaction and now needed to cash it out. I can't imagine there's a whole lot of 1000oz platinum bars floating around out there so it would pretty easy to find out if it was stolen or not by submitting the serial number to law enforcement. It would be a good way to legitimize a large sum of money if you had to, though.