sac: a sunny place for shady people.

Ever since dropping my phone in the snow, the camera works only about 1/3 of the time, and the phone functionality only works half of the time. With that said, I’ve recently been on the lookout for a cell phone to use until I can renew my contract in a few months. I’ve been trying out craigslist, but I’ve only had two experiences on there, so I’d have to describe my CL experience as fairly limited. At a cursory glance, all the listings look slightly shady. I have noticed the following trends on craigslist though:

It seems that there are quite a few people who receive iphone 4’s as gifts, with no box and occasionally bad serial numbers. Odd…didn’t know that was a hot gift item this time of year.

It also seems that at least 10 people in the Sac area have been buying smartphones for their significant others the week before they break-up. I wonder if there’s ever been a study done on that…is there a correlation between buying your girlfriend an iphone and them dumping you soon thereafter? Very interesting indeed.

There are also people offering to add you to their family plan at a discounted rate…this strikes me as a little dumb…because if they have a phone on your account…can’t they just rack-up the bill every month and you’d be saddled with the cost? Why on earth would you offer such a thing…

So I decided to steer away from this place for a while…maybe on ebay it’ll be better. So I decide to do a few searches on ebay. Some of these listings look pretty legit, with sealed brand new phones and all, but some of these are downright shady as well. Some of these guys are offering ones that are listed as ones with bad ESNs (read: reported stolen). Of course ebay is perfectly fine with these sales - no red flags popping up in their system – very comforting.

At this point, pretty much any buy on craigslist or ebay is going to land me in hot water…maybe falling off the grid for the next few months will do me some good.