So here's what happened. I advertised one of those large honorary checks that they often give out to the winning player of a big tournament. In this case it was Dennis Orcollo's check for winning the 2013 U.S. Open One Pocket Championship. He gave it to me after his win in return for favors I had done for him. I found it stored away in the back of my garage and decided someone else might be able to use it to decorate their poolroom. I put it up for sale on several Facebook billiard marketplaces.
Right away This guy Watson contacts me and says he already sent me money and shows me a screen shot that looks like it's from Paypal. I accepted it as real and packed the poster up and took it to UPS. Only after I get back home do I discover that no money from him had hit my account. There was no record of any such transaction and his original communication with me on FB was gone as well. I messaged him directly and he made a joke out of it, saying he paid me through FB and I should talk to Mark Zuckerburg if I had a problem. He was putting a LOL in every comment to me. I told him that I did not get any money from him and had already sent it through UPS. He continued to tell me that he sent the money and asked me to show him proof (a screenshot of my PayPal account) that I did not get it. I declined to do that, saying I had no proof since I never got any money and wasn't about to show him anything from my PayPal account. He told me it could just be slow coming from FB to PayPal and not to worry.
Now it has been all day (since early this morning) and there is still no money from him in my PayPal account. I went back to UPS and intercepted the package before it went out. I did not tell him this in my communication with him and he assumed the package was already on its way. At UPS they told me this has happened before. The buyer (Watson) gets an alert the moment I buy the shipping label from Facebook, which I had done right away. Then they quickly cancel the transaction on Paypal and it is removed and their money returned. All record of it is then erased from PayPal. When I went back home and checked on it there was no record of the transaction on PayPal. Zero, nothing!
This guy kept insisting to me that he sent me the money and showed me the same screenshot over and over again. What do you think? Am I missing something here? For me there were just too many clues (mainly no money!) that he was lying to me and trying to cover up afterwards. He did continue to chat with me on FB for over thirty minutes when I confronted him, and he began to get very argumentative. I admit I did not respond well to that when he called me an old man living in California, and what a terrible place to live it was. I told him that was none of his business and that I wasn't too old to give him an ass whipping and he was lucky he was so far away. Yes I was mad. Sorry about that.
Anyway at the end of the day I have the poster back, retrieved from UPS and a new buyer who is legit. If Watson's money ever does come to me I will just send it back, but that seems pretty doubtful right now. It's been over ten hours since this started.
One other thing. I called Sidepockets in Shreveport and they told me he did not work there. He told me he put on tournaments for them, so someone is lying. Does anyone here know this guy?
