I visited my mom after they moved into their new house. She unlocked the back door and the alarm beeped a couple of times. She went over and typed in the PIN. I saw the piece of paper taped to the wall with numbers on it.
I said “Mom! This makes your alarm system useless!”
She answered, “I’m not that dumb son. That’s the panic code. If someone tries to use it for the PIN, they have a nasty surprise coming.”
Sheesh! No wonder I never got away with anything as a kid. She was a step ahead of me the whole time.
The problem isn’t so much with charging high prices during a shortage. It takes extra time, effort and transportation to bring items from an area of availability to an area of shortage.
The problem is that some of these folks created the shortage by raiding all of the stores in their region, buying up all of the local stock, and then selling it at inflated prices because of the shortage they created.
That is way different from buying supplies from a region where they are plentiful and selling them in an area of shortage.
Yes it was a scam. $10,000 shows up in your account, you send $9,800 back, then the $10,000 turns up to be a bad deposit and you are out $9,800.
Scammers are doing this on Craig’s List and various other internet sales. They want to buy your stuff and transfer you more money than the cost and you refund them the difference. Their transfer bounces and you are out the change.
Also, NEVER let anyone who is not your known computer help desk run team viewer on your computer.