A friend of mine was walking down the street last week, when two guys in a van stopped and leaned out the window.
“Excuse me” they say. “I know this sounds a bit wierd, but … do you want a free Home Theatre system?”
“A what?”
“Well, you see, we were delivering two home theatre systems to this place, but it turns out they only ordered one, so now we’ve got this extra one we don’t know what to do with. The boss said it was too much trouble to send it back, so he told us to just get rid of it. Do you want it?”
Now, this was supposedly a system worth … I can’t remember if it was fifteen thousand or fifteen hundred dollars … anyway, a LOT of money. And these guys are going to just give it away to a random passing stranger? I don’t THINK so!
My friend declined the offer, because he was about 90% sure it was a scam of some sort. I’m a HUNDRED percent sure it’s a scam of some sort, but it’s driving me crazy trying to figure out what the scam is. The only thing I can think of so far is that it’s a device to gain entry to someone’s house to case the joint, then they come back later and take the “home theatre” and everything else, but honestly…it sounds like a lot of trouble (compared to, say “knock knock … oh sorry, does Tina live here?..must have the wrong house…” and similar strategies )
So - any ideas? What were these guys trying to pull?
Just on a whim, I entered “free home theater scam” into a Yahoo search. I found a message board for an audiophile web site, there was a thread where there multiple posts of people raving about how they had purchased “model x” of some speakers from two guys in a van/SUV/truck in states from all over the union.
It seems this is a pretty common phenomenon, they all had the same story as you, boss said don’t return, blah, blah, blah.
If they were selling it I’d say it was a scam, there’s a pretty famous one that works that way. I had someone try and pull it on me many years ago, was hanging out with a buddy when a guy in a van waved us over and gave us his pitch.
His story is that he went to a warehouse to pick up 8 speakers and they gave him 8 pairs by accident, so he’s got 4 extra pairs of speakers in the van that he wants to sell cheap. Shows us a brochure indicating that these are worth (hundreds of dollars per pair), offers them for (much, much less than that). Suffice it to say that if you buy anything you’ll be getting cheap crap at an inflated price.
However this was free…did they just say “Here it is, throw it in your car and have a nice day”? Frankly it stinks, I have a hard time imagining “the boss” telling them to ditch thousands of dollars worth of electronics which could easily be put on Ebay or something to make the money back.
Mayhap they would have changed their tune if he’d agreed - “well, come on, this is a really nice system. How about a hundred bucks just for our time?” or something like that. Just a WAG.
I wasn’t there, so of course I’ve only got a second-hand account of it. But my friend was pretty insistent they said free (and I’d heard about the “white van” scam before, so I did ask…)
The more I think about it, the more likely “get him on the hook THEN sting him for cash” sounds.
Or else they are just really REALLY bad scam artists! Perhaps it’s their loss-leader!
Maybe they were going to offer to hand it to him on the spot, expecting him to say something like “Well, I can’t carry it on my head! Can I pay you to deliver it?” Then the negotiation begins.
But it’s a sure bet that either the merchandise was stolen, or there was really nothing in the boxes worth having.
They charge you for the installation, usually about twice what the system would cost to buy yourself. And of course, that is the only way you can get it for free. There has been a bunch of people like this hanging out in the parking lots of my employer.
I was approached by a couple of these guys at a traffic light the other day. I told them that, “As a rule, I don’t buy things out of the back of trucks.”
They kept insisting it was on the up and up and flashing a piece of paper that was supposedly the invoice.
After reading this thread and the others (and some websites about the White Van Scam), it looks like a lot of people have been approached to buy speakers out of a van. I was asked at a mall quite a few years ago if I wanted to buy some speakers – IIRC this happened to some friends around the same time – and I said no, assuming they were stolen. (And now I’m far too cynical to accept any unsolicited offer of goods – even if somehow it didn’t seem like a scam.)
From the websites about this scam, it seems that the ‘distributors’ use the idea that the people who buy the speakers think they are buying stolen goods as a justification for what they do. But the scam is set up in a way so that the target won’t think the speakers are stolen (and they’re not). They fast-talk people into buying speakers, thinking they’re getting a good deal for some reason – they don’t make people think they’re buying stolen speakers. So I guess the ‘distributors’ justify what they do in the same way that any scam artist does: they’re making a lot of money off gullible people. In some cases, they even try to recruit people who see through the scheme. It reminds me of something someone trying to sell laundry balls once told me: ‘It doesn’t work, but it’s a great way to make money.’ (I think I was reading the book that explains how the device worked. Scam devices always seem to have these, and it’s highly entertaining to read about how something ‘aligns the water molecules so you don’t need soap’ or ‘changes the magnetic field in your gasoline so you get 300 miles per gallon’ when you have some basic scientific knowledge.)
Aspidistra: Did the spiel end at ‘Do you want it?’ Because ‘get rid of it’ doesn’t necessarily mean for free; the next step might have been saying that it’s worth $10,000, but they’ll sell it to you for only $2,000. Or, like others have said, maybe there was an outrageous installation fee. (I wonder if they offered an extended warranty – that’s basically a scam anyway.)
