Man Buys Old Safe for $122.93 on eBay, Finds $26,000 Inside

Mistake. I errored on the sellers name as Larry, it's James.

What a story. At first I really felt bad for Larry, and even thouth, wouldn't it be nice if he did get some of the money back, then I read all the comments and reports, and something doesn't sound right. On his e-bay listing, he states that he didn't open the safe as he didn't have the combination. Then the buyer states in his positive feed back, that there was $6,000 in it. Larry's reply was that the buyer was playing a joke, as the safe was empty. Now the buyer has called the news station to say that there was $26,000 in it after he had a welder open it, then Larry wants half of the money. If it was locked when he shipped it, how did the money get in there? If Larry had bought the safe at an auction, got it home and opened it up to find $10,000 in it, would he have tried to find the previous owner to offer half of it? This all seems a little strange. Was there $6,000 or $26,000 or any money at all? Could this be a scam for people to feel sorry for Larry, and 26,000 people send him a $1 and he and the buyer split the money? Just a thought.

As far as buying/saving on eBay goes:

If you see an item that you want listed in auction format, send the seller a message asking if they will accept $x to end the auction early and sell the item to you. May be telling them that they would not have to wait as long to get their money (they would probably know that, but it still might help). If that does not work, use a sniping service such as Bidball.com to bid for you. It'll bid in the last few seconds, helping you to save money and avoid shill bidding.

If there is a particular item that you are looking for, and especially if it is relatively rare on eBay, use a site like Ebuyersedge.com to set up saved searches. You'd get an e-mail whenever a match is listed. Great for "Buy It Now"s priced right. You can use the price, category, exclude Word, etc. filters to narrow down the list of results that you receive in the e-mails.

Try a misspelling search site like Typojoe.com to hopefully find some deals with items that have main keywords misspelled in the title. Other interested buyers might never see them. Then, if the item is listed an auction format, after a few days of no bids (hopefully anyway) send the seller and offer to end the auction early and sell the item to you. They may worry that no one is interested, and take whatever they can get.

If I was a guy with a bunch of old crappy safes and wanted to sell them all on ebay I would stage something like this. "Sell" a safe with $26000 in it to a friend and then have him get a media frenzy talking about it..... and then throw in there on the news that by the way I have a ton more locked safes to sell.

Then just sit back and watch the bidding go through the roof.

You're right! I got that backwards. Fixed now.

Technically, the story is the seller is in California, buyer in Bartlett, Tennessee.
/lives in Memphis, next to Bartlett. I have not read the eBay comments....

The buyer is playing a practical joke. The news people jumped on this story a little bit too soon. Go to ebay and read the comments that the seller left on the review.
Best joke ever.