6/3/08

This year has not been going at all well. First, I haven't been able to do any torching because I have a pinched nerve in my neck, and the 'referred pain' goes into my shoulder and arm. I've been spending most of my time in bed, because that's where I have the least amount of pain. Then I haven't been selling on Etsy because a woman there has been buying beads from Ebay and Etsy and reselling them on Etsy as her own. Don't ever make a Lampworketc. member mad; boy, are they going after her tooth and nail. They filed complaints with Etsy, Ebay, Paypal, the FBI (Internet fraud), gotten her kicked off SRA (Self-representing Artists), SRAJD (Self-representing Artist Jewelry Designers), International Society of Glass Beadmakers, and others. They have found everything about her but what color toilet paper she uses (Wow, am I dating myself! When did they stop making colored toilet paper?)

This woman says she lives in Milan, Italy, but she has another Etsy shop for selling cookies, which she says she makes in Waco, Texas. She is all over the Internet. She's listed as a florist in Texas, and a tutor! She buys beads and has them sent to Waco, but when she sells beads, they get sent from Italy. For all the stuff that she claims she does, we've decided she's been cloned. You have to read the thread to really get a sense of how convoluted the path is. http://www.lampworketc.com/forums/showthread.php?t=92814

She's bad enough, but the reason so many lampworkers are angry at Etsy is because they've had the proof (photos and receipts, etc.) that she's a fraud for a couple of weeks now, and all they've done is go into her sold items and removed the claim that she made the beads herself, and they've shut down forum discussions about her. Why they're protecting her is anyone's guess. So alot of lampworkers are not listing new items until she's taken care of.

And then yesterday morning, I got about 12,000 spams in the space of a few hours. I called the phone company and they said someone was using my email address to spam people, and what I was seeing was all the rejected spams getting sent back to me! Dirty rotten spammers! I just don't get it. I sure wish I could sent an electric current back to their computer and fry it. So I've had to change my email address. Now I get to go to all the different places I've registered at and change my address. What fun...

I'm going back to bed.