You have to wonder how financially strapped some people must be to have the nerve to put the following items up for auction on the Internet.
Take for instance the Brazilian man who offered to sell his wife for about $50.
It’s not only sad, but it’s true… and it prompted the government to intervene. According to news reports, Brazil’s Secretariat of Public Policies for Women ordered Mercado Livre, which is partially owned by eBay, to remove the ad for the man’s wife and warned it was violating a law banning the offer or sale of “human organs, people, blood, bones or skin.”
(As of yesterday the ad was gone.)
The man who posted the ad wrote this in the item’s description area: “I sell my wife for reasons I prefer to keep short … I really need the money.” He also wrote a few sentences describing his wife’s physical attributes and listed her qualities as a homemaker and companion. He reportedly said she was 35 and “worth her weight in gold.”
Various news agencies said they couldn’t confirm if the ad was meant as a joke. (If I were the man’s wife I sure wouldn’t be laughing.)
There’s another woman who is not smiling today—thanks in large part to her ill-placed eBay ad.
According to news reports, an Oregon elementary school teacher may soon be out of a job after she tried to sell a “hot” item on eBay.
How’s this for a stupid move: the teacher put a coat she allegedly stole from one of her students on the popular Internet auction site. And she may have gotten away with it if it weren’t for the fact that the mother of the child whose coat it was saw it there before someone else bought it.
Now the teacher faces charges of theft and computer crimes.
According to local police, this is how the crime was discovered: the girl “lost” her coat; her mother then searched the school’s lost-and-found for the coat, but couldn’t find it. The girl’s mom then decided to turn to eBay for a replacement. After finding what she thought was an identical coat, the girl’s mother noticed that the seller was from the same Oregon town she lived in. The mother alerted another bidder that the coat might be stolen, and the other bidder relayed the information to the teacher. Then get this: the teacher then reportedly asked the other bidder to outbid the girl’s mother.
Long story short—-the girl’s mother notified police and the teacher is now on leave from the $69,000 job she has held for 20 years… and is headed to court. By the way, the teacher denies she stole the coat. Rather, she told police that she got it from the school’s lost-and-found.
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