entertaining Salma Hayekness at waxidrome
tripledouble
7,636 Posts
things have been kindof boring over here, so enjoy this holiday nugget of raer beef. fun!
http://waxidermy.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=39053&start=0
http://waxidermy.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=39053&start=0
The end of 2011 is upon us and although we still have two more weeks i figured that now was as good a time as any to announce the winner of the
SCUMBAG OF THE YEAR AWARD
The vote was unanimous and i'd like to offer a hearty congratulations to this year's winner:
MIKE SIMONETTI
AKA: BOOKWORMNJ (on ebay)
Owner of record label: ITALIANS DO IT BETTER
(as pictured on left - apologies in advance to whoever the other dude in the picture is)
My style is generally not to make private business public but i'm sad to say that the only thing worse than a guy who tries to run a scam to con you out of $1600 is a guy who runs a scam to con you out of $1600 10 days before X-mas.... and to take it one level further, the only thing worse than that is a guy who runs such a scam while pretending to be his own wife. Wow. Indeed.
High bidder on the copy of The Nothing - a $1500 KBD punk 7" i sold roughly a week ago - was a buyer Bookwormnj... this ebay account sells quite a bit of records on ebay and is registered under a woman's name in NJ with a 4000+ feedback rating.
I sent Bookwormnj an invoice following the auction with a total including shipping with tracking + insurance. I received a very strange reply from the buyer asking for me to re-invoice without the cost of insurance. The cost of insurance is debated back and forth in a few emails with the buyer insisting that he/she is not responsible for insurance costs and refuses to pay them. As a goodwill gesture i even offer to pay 1/2 the cost of insurance which the buyer also rejects. Finally i concede and send an invoice without insurance but with cost of shipping and tracking.
The buyer pays immediately and while the account is registered under a woman's name, i do see the name Mike Simonetti attached to the account. Since i've met Mike on numerous occasions i did find the argument re: insurance costs to be a bit strange. I emailed the buyer direct and more or less indicate that we've met in the past and i find it strange that he's unwilling to pay for insurance on such a large purchase. At this point the buyer emails me back and states that this isn't Mike Simonetti but actually his wife and she's buying the records as a gift for her husband.
Move forward about 3 to 4 days from the time of payment and i receive an email from a false account under the name of Jenn Kubilic - this is not the name registered on the ebay account nor the email used for prior correspondence. This email account has essentially cut and pasted all our prior correspondence and asked for tracking information on the parcel which i provide from my Blackberry while on the go without realizing that the buyer is emailing from a different email address. I receive another email indicating that the tracking information shows delivery online but the buyer never received the parcel. I then receive a followup email at 6:30 PM that day stating that they contacted their post office and spoke directly with the carrier who stated that he left the parcel at their front door. They further state that they were also expecting some Amazon deliveries that same day which also didn't arrive and someone obviously must have stolen their mail which was an ongoing problem in their quaint NJ town. Calling this email nonchalant is an understatement.
Rather than replying, i took the liberty of calling Mr. Simonetti's post office myself the next morning and luckily reached his mail carrier directly at 8:45AM. Not only did the carrier identify the address i provided as Simonetti's without being prompted, he also indicated that no one had contacted him the day before about any missing packages nor had their been any problems with stolen mail in the area. Thanks!
Later that same day, i receive additional emails from the false account set up under Jenn Kublic asking or me to reply so we can "deal with the situation" of the missing parcel... yeah right. 15 minutes after this final email, 4 disputes are opened on all items purchased through ebay and essentially $1600 are held from my account. Great feeling right before the holidays.
After consulting with Simonetti's local police department, ebay, and the U.S. Postal Inspectors Office, i thought it best to maybe contact Simonetti's wife at her workplace (which was quite easy to locate), since after all her name is the one registered on the account and our prior email correspondence indicated that she was the one making the purchase. Suffice to say that the ebay purchases/disputes, missing parcel, and $1600 worth of punk 7"s bought as a gift were all of a great surprise to her. At this point i thought it might be a good idea to let Simonetti's wife know exactly what kind of scam was going on here since $1600 certainly would make this a criminal matter and also a case of mail fraud to boot. Obviously i wouldn't want her name to be involved if any legal action was taken since it was quite apparent that she was not involved with the situation in the slightest . The conversation was cordial and professional. All correspondence and links to the auctions, disputes, and otherwise were forwarded by email. No more than 1 hour later all the disputes were closed through ebay. I don't imagine the dinner conversation was too fun that night for our friend Mike.
Somewhere on this board i know Simonetti has an account since he once failed to pay for a metal LP off a sale of mine and then proceeded to let me know what an important DJ he was b/c he flies all over the world and how he would beat my ass, etc. Let's see if he pops up.
My intention here is not to stir up more of a mess than necessary but i'm afraid to say that when someone tries to scam you out of $1600, it certainly merits a retelling so that others don't deal with a similarly deceitful and criminal situation in the future. Furthermore, I think it takes a real special kind of person to not only try to rip someone off for such a large sum but to actually do so under the false identity of their own wife. You, my friend, are a super-awesome person.
To conclude, i'd like to bring this interesting anecdote full circle by clarifying the lessons learned from this experience:
Lesson 1) Never try to run a criminal scam in a significant other's name unless she or he is on the deal - otherwise this is the ultimate backfire especially if your significant other is a decent human being unlike you.
Lesson 2) Always remember that the internet is a magical world full of information including links to flickr accounts attached to your email with pictures of bands on your former label like Wolf Eyes, Manowar fan-pages, and the most truly inane yahoo forum posts about your friend's cruddy DJ gig at the Knitting Factory circa 2003... not to mention posts on a local NJ forum looking for a babysitters or the pictures of the miniature Espresso Cafe you lovingly hold in the backyard of your NJ home in the summertime for friends. Very cute.
Lesson 3) Never - and i mean never - fuck with someone who previously worked as an investigator for the Federal Public Defenders.
So once again i'd like to congratulate Mike Simonetti on this very special honor and may you enjoy your lousy punk records and cruddy skinny jeans disco gigs round the world for many years to come! Merry X-mas, Happy Hanukkah, and a HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Comments
That's fucking awesome, mane, great post!!! It's nice to see assholes get their just desserts. What comes around goes around. Have a great holiday, bruh!!!
Peace,
Big Stacks from Kakalak
LOL. Loved that part!
Have the veteranos forgotten how to strut? Are they on some late era Pablo Jazz shit? And the kids are just into ringtones? Is it a gulf too wide? We can find out later this week if the thread has no more responses but still hasn't moved off page 2.
:hi:
It appears so. Looking at the Kubler-Ross model, I wonder where the Strut is in the 5 stages theory?
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, or acceptance?
The net is real!
eBay sucks.
Hmmm... just read that CavernDiscos thread. Interesting.
Beef over a $1500 punk 7" is not something that's likely to kick off on here. The strut has been "a wrap" for a long time now, but it still trundles on. Waxidermy seemed to hit a tipping point a while back and is probably itself on the slow but invertible decline towards "a wrap" status.
Yet here we stand on a tiny 4.54 billion year old rock, alongside 7 billion other people, hurtling through space at an unimaginable speed around a giant ball of fire.
Internally narrating our own little stories with some other 0.000001% of those people
as we try to occupy our time talking about thin discs of a plastic material upon which sound has been recorded.
Based on what?
Waxidermy is far busier than it was just a few months ago.
I haven't been there in a while, but was curious... that thread is such a bad look on so many levels.
Waxidermy = Revenge of the Nerds
I know. I think I'm one of the only people from the record community who is actually friends with Spelunk these days. Regardless of all the perceived mishaps with his record hustling practices, I consider him a good friend who is super sharp and has great entrepreneurial drive.
People had real beef with that dude's way of doing things, some of which I see quite clearly. I do get how he came across as arrogant at times for his ability to get rare shit, all the while considering he did most of his sales on a consignment basis and did very little footwork to actually find the vast majority of this stuff in the field. Other folks on Waxi like Showandtell Will (a friend of mine and an all-around awesome dude) do consignments on a regular basis, yet he is highly respected in our the community because he is a veteran in the game and earned his respect over years and years. I was one of the main people that Spelunk was consigning for early on, since he gave me a really amazing consignment rate and was generally super cool about it. Later he changed his rates and I dropped out completely.
I think SportCas has a great cause to not like the dude since Spelunk flipped a couple of the records he won from him as auctioned off as Heatrocks for Haiti. I personally don't agree with what he did there for sure.
There was a noticeable tipping point where it became en vogue to hate on him, when in one of his sales threads on Waxidermy he plainly told all the folks on there that questioned his methods that he "DIDN'T GIVE A FUCK". Yeah, probably wasn't a good idea. But you know what? If he listened to half the grumpy fucks that plague Waxidermy it would be a wrap.
** Raises hand **
That thread was a truly depressing study in haterdom.
This kind of self-loathing is exactly why Waxidermy is not nearly a wrap yet!
SS has fallen big time, really sucks. I don't know if its the format, real life, boredom, or the same ole snatch sleeping next to you,
whatever it is, it stinks.
I've been watching waxidermy a lot lately. Users seem really cool but take nerdery to another level on topics. Knowledge dropped though.
Taste is all over the place which I like in that place.
Do people dj on waxi, or just clean off dust to their collection of rural rock?
I support both.
Used records are bigger than ever in my city, so the source and knowledge is needed by venues like ss and waxi.
A lot of people are over this site and I'm OK with that. I am grateful for all the contributions they have made over the years and wish them well.
I always told myself that I would kill the site as soon as I stopped getting value out of it. And 12 years later I learn and discover new things every day, so to me it hasn't "fallen off".
It is however lacking in the sensationalized beef threads that have since migrated over to Waxidermy. Those were fun in my mid-late 20s but I have since grown out of that. So I don't miss them.
As for Brendan, he came along late in the game, so I had no dealings with him after I stopped doing the record grind. I knew that he contributed to SS and supported this place financially and was super cool to me.... nothing led me to concur that he needed to be raked over the coals like he did in that thread. Everyone came across as some jealous hatters.
Wait.....so all those Waxidermy dudes are making the big bucks and dating hot chicks?
I meant that it sucks that this site isn't moving like it should.
Still of value, its just creeping though. You would think the cold season (north america related) would help with activity.
without a doubt.
Waxidrome is the same shit through a different lens. its all good. spelunk's retirement and aleit sonning a scam artist are fun, but dont rank as world events in my opinion...even record world events. mingering mike shit doesnt happen everyday, but that was something epic. hopefully we'll see some of that on one or both forums sometime soon.
what does need to happen: more set sales plaese
Ironically, I was once told that Waxidermy was started to escape all of the beef here at SS.
I've met Brendan and he seems like a decent dude......most record related hate is based in jealousy.
lets laugh at the madness of others!
Hey Tripdubs,
You hit the 'issue with Soulstrut' for me dead on the head...life happens. I used to post a lot, but life has become busier with my new role at work. I was trippin' on how much I used to post, now I can't remember the last time I started a thread. I plan on become more involved in the near future, as 2011 was a tough-ass year. I remain a die-hard 'Strutter as this place is way more than just an Internet site to me; it's a true community. I appreciate everyone on here, and I'm glad to be a part of this place.
Peace,
Big Stacks from Kakalak
i barely post here anymore, but i enjoy browsing/lurking.
i have found a lot of knowledge here and enjoy the mixes.
also---on one occasion a month ago-----i sold a record online where the only information of it was found here on the strut! weird that in all that time nothing else came up.
i don't even have an account on waxidermy, but it was linked on a messageboard i frequent.
in that waxidermy thread---i am mentioned by mr. mike s in his long rant--i had one issue with him years ago that had some similarities to aleit's case, albeit on a much, much smaller scale. that's all i'll say for the sake of not wanting to add to the drama.
anyways---tripdub posted this, and here i am reminiscing about the good 'ol days of the strut!