I just read a thread in the ICEforum about "Cheap Speakers" and it reminded of a true story that made the local news a few years back.

A few years back someone got hold of a few container loads of crappy speakers in big speaker enclosures from some place in the US.

They then employed students to drive around towns up and down the country accosting passers by thus:

"hey - wanna buy some cheap speakers?"

When you looked in the van,. they had a van load of speakers alright - all in their original packaging and despite the sellers statements otherwise of course, everyone thought they were stolen goods (why sell cheap speakers if not?) - the deal was "cash on the spot" and you take your speakers with you. (yeah like you carry a trolley round with you in case someone offers you the deal of your life - psst, wanna buy a cheap refrigerator?)

Of course, it wasn't long before the complaints to the police flooded in about these guys driving white umarked vans selling cheap speakers from the roadside.

Naturally the cops investigated, they found it was all above board and apart from making some comment about the sales pitch ignored them from then on.

Then, someone bought some speakers, found they didn't sound very good quality (surprise, surprise) and complained to one of those consumer rights TV shows.

And that show then ran some test on the speakers it turns out the speakers were pretty cheap and nasty, with terrible bad response curves, etc.

But, there was no comeback under local laws to the sellers (assuming you could find the guys you bought your speakers off of anyway - difficult since the vans were all rented and the students had disappeared to other towns elsewhere).
And in any case the goods were, exactly as they were described i.e. "cheap speakers".

Dunno what happened after that - I assume once the story was blown wide open, that no-one with any sense would buy them anymore, so I guess they just folded their tents and stole away in the night....

Still must a lot of those speakers gathering dust around the place somewhere.

I dunno, this might be sorta mean, but... If you're retarded enough to buy speakers out of the back of some van on the side of the street, then you sorta deserve what you get.

I'm guessing they made their way back to the USA..... I was offered some 'cheap quality speakers' out the back of a white van in Boston a few months ago. Needless to say, I kindly refused.

And possibly to Toronto and Vancouver, as well. I've been offered cheap speakers twice. Once in Vancouver, while on a road trip with a buddy of mine. The car was already loaded with crap -- I have no idea where they thought we could put a pair of speakers. The second time was while walking to work one day. They were offering $1300 (CAD) speakers for $300. Something to do with "over-stock". I declined, but a guy at work took them up on the offer. After he got them home, he looked them up on the web to discover they were actually worth what they claimed they were. I have to admit, I'm still not kicking myself for letting the deal go by.

Read the reviews:

Audioreview.com

I like the comment "$250 from a van down by the river". Visions of Chris Farley just pop up.

Yup, this scam is still going on, last year sometime I was offered speakers out of a white van in berkeley. They'd gotten smart and were using chicks to get guys attention... I just said no thanks and keep walking, as I'd read about it before. I think the main idea is to get college age guys who can't afford good speakers but want to have big speakers to impress their friends and don't know any better. I figure they're about the same quality as the massive speakers they sell on ubid.com for $9 plus $120 shipping.

Matthew

Has happened here in the UK too - a TV programme found the warehouse reselling them and got a job to see the training. I think the speakers basically cost £30, the bloke running the business needed a minimum £200 cut and the rest could be kept by the salesman. Everything was legal except for the wattage specs on the box, apparently they should have specified PMPO as that's what they quoted.

The funniest thing was some student paid £650 for set on the strength of the sales guy telling him they were worth £2k!!!

Gareth

I don't disagree with your comments, but read the comments here and do a bit of web digging - this scam is far more widespread than I thought.


Also, I note that from This Link that the scammers are still active locally this year - as reported by duped people.

The other point is that as has been pointed out before, whoever runs this scam (or franchise as I would expect it would be by now), that they have done their legal homework.

Here you have 7 days protection under the law, but the people who drive the vans are independant contractors/agents, so the main distributor has no responsibility to provide refunds.

And of course, you can only get your refund from the person(s) you bought the goods off - and then only if you know who they are and can track them down - and probably have to beat the [censored] out of them to get a refund (which is probably why they always travel as pairs).

As an aside, I was offered some of these speakers at the side of the road near (my then) place of employment - the guys driving past saw me paying some money to my colleague (so he could buy his lunch and pay me back the next day, to save a walk to the ATM), the small wad of $20 notes in my hands as I gave my colleague the money, must have lit up on these guys radar - because their van screeched to a halt beside me and my colleague and the "wanna buy some cheap speakers" spiel rang out - I wasn't aware of the scam at that point, I didn't need any speakers - but they were persistant - wouldn't take no for a answer.

You'd have to be pretty stupid or greedy/dishonest to have swallowed their story, but maybe they assume that 1 in 10 people they approach buy a set.
Then its off to the next victim.

Just been doing a bit of digging myself - it is a *very* widespread scam, like every county widespread!

This site (from archive.org) details the company I mentioned and that they give refunds to people that track them down, though looking at Google Groups there hasn't been any relevant posts since 2001- I guess it's just a matter of time before people forget about the scam and they can start all over again!

Gareth

I knew somebody that fell for this scam as well. I think he paid £300. Not sure if they were Dynalab ones though

- Trevor

And not just speakers - couple of weeks ago I was hailed over to a parked Z3 where some guy did the exact same spiel, but this time selling watches. No, I didn't buy one....

Steve.

It's funny that this thread popped up. Two days ago, an ad appeared on Craigslist (a local bulletin board of sorts) for a pair of Acoustic Response speakers for $250. I wrote the guy a note and said "nice white van speakers dude!" and also posted a note on Craigslist warning people not to pay over 10 bucks for the speakers.

The guy wrote me back and said "what are you talking about dude?" So I wrote him back and said "did I get the color of the van wrong?"

He then wrote back and said "haha, yeah, they were a gift and the person that gave them to me told me something about a van... what do you think they are worth?"

Of course, I wrote him back and told him the throw the speakers out as they weren't worth a dollar... He got pretty defensive at that point and said that they sounded great.

Different strokes...

- Jon

I got offered the same thing this summer in Austin. Pulling out of an ATM and two kids in a white van with the back loaded up with Polk Audio speakers called over.

To be honest, the speakers my friend bought sounded okay. They were overpriced and he was ripped off but in the end it was just like every other cheapo speaker set out there. Good enough for the average person but terrible if you actually knew what to listen for.

- Trevor

They ran the same thing here in NL, and I got accosted the same way.

Why do you assume they were "Students"? That's a pretty bigoted thing to say (the implication that students are crooked gits and will do anything for a fiver). The blokes who got me were definite "Wide Boys" who definitely WERE crooked gits who would do anything for a fiver.

jbauer: That's a funny story. Haha, get suckered into buying them than give 'em as a gift.

But hey, I agree with the others: if you're suckah enough to buy from someone on the street, you get what you pay for.

Now, the dude that used to sell CDs outside of Central Park in NYC... I saw this guy at the same place like three different times across two years. Of course I bought some CDs from him; jazz compilations from no-name record labels. Hey, they were pressed (non-CDR) and they had good content. But man, was it shady. I guess they were pressed and packaged by an unauthorized duplication service that is good at small print runs. Hey, it only costs like $2.50/piece to make a complete CD package 500 quantity. Not a bad mark up to sell it for $10.

I'll fall for "hey wanna buy some cheap CD's?" over anything else any day. Well, except for "hey, wanna buy some cheap empegs?"

In reply to:

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Why do you assume they were "Students"? That's a pretty bigoted thing to say

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You may think that my assertion about them being students is bigotted but you are wrong.

I said they were "students" because the consumer rights show that followed up on the original complaints tracked down the "agent"/wholesaler who sold the guys in the vans the goods in the first place (this same agent also denied any responsibility for the sales pitches and prices being charged by the people selling the speakers on the streets).

This "agent" said that he believed they were mostly students and he indicated that he particularly advertised amoungst the student community (rather than the unemployed) as they generally had a driving license, were keen to earn extra money for their studies etc and did not mind travelling out of town if needed (obviously to rip off locals in other places nearby).

So, thats why I said they were students, whether the current crop of people selling them locally are still students I don't know, but these guys were students when the issue first appeared here, were described as such and nobody seemed to care one way or the other - there are crooked people in all walks of life, and the number of people in vans selling these things at any one time is probably pretty small, so to say that the van drivers are students is not necassarily IMHO casting aspersions on every student in the country or world.