Gambling

I don't have a lot to say about yesterday's Showbiz Poker other than to say that, much as I like the game, it can be incredibly infuriating. Good company, bad cards. No doubt some bad play on my part also.

Harumphing over - I now have something more serious to actually grumble about. Oddly it's another ebay related menace but this one is more serious than the apparent theft of £6.99 I mentioned a few days ago. Someone is basically claiming to be me in an attempt to rip off innocent people - up to 1000 of them - of £1.01 each. So far I think three people have fallen for it so he's only made £3.03 out of his fraudulent ways... but if his masterplan was successful he'd make over a grand out of 1000 tiny frauds.

The item is titled Dave Gorman ebay experiment - take part now!. It claims that I'm making a TV special about ebay and essentially that people can help out/take part by purchasing an imaginary widget for £1.01.

Obviously this is a lie and I'd like to think that anyone reading it would know it's a lie. There are several give-aways in the listing. For a start whoever wrote the listing can't spell. It's existence not existance, imaginary not immaginary and alleged not alledged. Anything that was meant to come from me would be better proof read than that.

It also shows a ridiculous paucity of imagination. I guess I'm used to this. When I first did Reasons To Be Cheerful I was inundated with e-mails from people suggesting other songs I could examine for future shows. When I did Better World I started to receive emails with suggestions for shows of an altruistic nature and when I did Are You Dave Gorman? my inbox overflowed with people suggesting things related to namesakes... other people's namesakes, lookalikes, people who share a birthday etc. etc. Now that I've done the Googlewhack Adventure people seem to have me labelled as some kind of internet-humourist and so I get lots of suggestions along similar lines. It seems very odd to me. The last thing I want to do is something-a-bit-like-the-thing-I've-just-done. The last thing I want to do is live up to some kind of label. Anyway, I guess it's this perception of me that made this ebay user (eb_ayflash) think his fraud seemed plausible and I suppose it's also the reason that the (satisfyingly paltry) three fools fell for it too.

I wrote to ebay about this yesterday and nothing seems to have been done about it so far. I've written an e-mail to the seller in question too. He hasn't taken it down yet. A few days ago when someone 'sold' me something on ebay and then disappeared with my money I posted their e-mail address on this page. I was narked that they'd taken my £6.99 but my tongue was in my cheek as I typed it. I thought it more amusing than anything else to take a small and petty grievance and discuss it here. I certainly wasn't intending to turn my page into some kind of ebay watchdog.

However this instance seems to be altogether different and rather more serious. And it isn't me who's being conned. Oh well. Here goes: His name is Jon Hogg. His address is ********edited******** and his phone number is 0151 *** ****.

Keep checking back at davegorman.com to see which miscreant's personal details I publish next!