You little monster! Boy, six, buys truck on eBay for £19k
‘Never guessed he wanted a real one’
THE day before his sixth birthday, Ario Faraji announced he wanted a ‘monster truck’.
So when he found his father’s laptop was turned on and logged into eBay, he found one... and bought it.
Unfortunately this wasn’t a toy version of the huge trucks with oversized wheels like the youngster wanted, but a full-size one – costing £19,000.
The online transaction has now plunged his 45-year-old father Mohammad into a five-month nightmare.
Unable to cancel the deal, the takeaway worker is being chased by debt collectors for the five-figure sum and threatened with legal action.
The purchase was carried out using the internet payment service PayPal, which insists he owes the money.
Meanwhile, Mr Faraji is officially the owner of an enormous vehicle that he doesn’t want, can’t legally drive on the road and hasn’t got the funds to pay for. Mr Faraji, of Wallsend, Newcastle, has called for more checks to avoid such errors.
He said: ‘Nobody can force me to buy a £19,000 monster truck.
‘PayPal should act more like my debit card, they should check with my bank account to see if I have the money, or if there is suspicious activity. I’ve used PayPal for over ten years but I’ve just been buying £4, £10, £20 items, never anything like this. I haven’t got that kind of money in my bank account, and nobody in their right mind would buy a car for that much money without seeing it, but it still went through.
‘For the amount of money they sent, there should have been some kind of extra security.’
Mr Faraji added: ‘It’s been going on since March and I’m just getting more stressed, it’s awful. I know it’s my fault that I hadn’t checked my laptop and that it had saved the password – my son is only little but he’s clever for his age and good with computers.
‘He loves monster trucks, and the 29th of March is his birthday, on the 28th he said he wanted a truck, but I never guessed he wanted to buy a real monster truck for himself.’ Boasting 66inch off-road tyres and a height of around 12ft, monster trucks have been entertaining crowds in the US since the 1970s.
At events, they take part in races and freestyle events where drivers perform stunts such as backflips and wheelies. In this country they are unlikely to be street legal because they are wider than a standard lane.
The eBay truck on offer was created from a Land Rover Discovery 3 chassis. Despite the mistake, Mr Faraji said the seller refused to cancel the sale and told him to collect the truck.
He said PayPal told him to work with eBay and the seller to resolve the issue, but he now wants to warn others about the incident.
Mr Faraji said: ‘It’s unbelievable that PayPal would pay it without sending any notification or contacting me to find out if I wanted to pay that amount of money.
‘People use PayPal because they think their money is safe, you think if something goes wrong you can cancel it and get your money, but that’s not what has happened.’
Last night the eBay seller, the boss of a car business in Telford, Shropshire, claimed not to have any knowledge of the row.
A PayPal spokesman said: ‘PayPal never loses sight of the fact that we are entrusted to look after people’s money – we take this responsibility very seriously and have a robust process in place for purchases made in error.’