So my wife needs a piano. It has to be a grand piano, and, as she is aspiring to be an international concert pianist, it has to be a Steinway. These are extremely expensive. For a long time, we've been trying to figure out what to do about this. Yesterday, she found an ad on netinstruments.com for an 1898 Steinway grand piano (one of the best years), being given away for free if you can pay the shipping, needs no work or anything. Apparently someone's late father passed away and his dying wish was to give away all of his instruments to aspiring musicians and charities.
So she called him. He said that it was not taken yet, that a few guys wanted it but he could tell they only wanted to resell it. But I feel sketched by it due to a few things. First, he asked her right off how much she would be willing to pay for it. But the thing is, he's French, with a serious language barrier... it's REALLY hard to understand him. But anyway, she told him $3000, and he decided that would be good. And then he said that he already made arrangements with some charity and paid them for shipping, so if we could send the money to the charity as a charitable donation, that would be good and he'd ship it first thing in the morning.
According to my wife there was no pushiness or anything and she had a good vibe from him. Then he said we'd have to use Liberty Reserve. So as I signed up for an account and got to reading about funding via a third party, I remembered from my experience in the gray-market Internet trade that Liberty Reserve and e-Gold sites like it are often used in order to make payment anonymous and to leave as little tracks as possible.
I got on the phone with him then since I was the one dealing with the payment-related stuff, and I got a so-so vibe from him... he seemed awfully interested in the money. But then again, it costs a hell of a lot to ship a grand piano from New York to NC up into the mountains. But another weird thing was that my wife did tell him we were in NC, but not where, but he had a specific amount that he said it cost him to ship, and he had said that he had already paid the charity for the shipping. How could he have known what the shipping would cost if we hadn't even called yet?
But through all this, I overall still felt it was probably legit... a lot of communication weirdness so any of this could be a little misunderstood. But then the Liberty Reserve third party funder called back and said they could only fund up to $500 since I was a first time customer unless I did I direct bank wire transfer. So I called the piano guy back and he said "that's ok, just send the $500 and then I'll tell you how you can send the rest later". This was a huge red flag to me... if this was legitimate, couldn't he just wait until we had a better solution? I asked if he could tell me what the better solution was first, and he got annoyed-sounding and said "you just send the $500 now and then call me back". Mmm hmm...
Then my wife and I decided we had to think about this for a while. I sent him a very nice and polite email explaining that I had to be careful because there are a lot of scammers in America, and I hoped I didn't offend him but I really needed to know the entire plan before sending him any money. And he didn't respond to the email (though I know he can write English fine, much better than speaking actually), but he tried calling over, and over, and over again (I ignored it). I turned my phone off and we went out to do some stuff for the night. We figured it was a test to see how he reacted. I turned my phone on once about an hour later to check the time, for like one minute, and during that brief time he called! He must have been calling non-stop.
This behavior raises some serious red flags if you ask me. We're going to check out some more background stuff tomorrow morning. I REALLY hope I'm just being paranoid because this piano is worth a fortune and is a once-in-a-lifetime find even to pay for, let alone to get for the cost of shipping! Even to get a barely acceptable one will end up costing around $20K, so if this could work out that would be almost mind-numbingly amazing. But we can't let desire override reason.
What do you guys think? Sounds fishy, doesn't it?