I normally would not post something like this, but people need to know about it.

A friend of mine, fairly new to the hobby, purchased an Indiana Jones off of Ebay from Prestige1, for a very substantial price. It was advertised as completely gone thru, everything cleaned and tested, 100% working, you know the usual stuff. The auction had plenty of pictures and it looked very good.

All in all, even though I considered the price high, it seemed like it would be a nice machine.

First red flag was when the seller said it wouldn't be shipped for 3 weeks, they needed to "double check" everything, make sure it was working perfectly. Turned out it was more like 5 weeks before it actually shipped. After another 10 days, the game finally arrived, had to clear customs and all that, so my friend was very excited. Well, excitement soon turned to extreme disappointment, the game was very dirty inside, cabinet was somewhat faded and had gouges in several places, game was as far from shopped as you can get. We brought up the auction pics and soon realized that this was not the game pictured in the auction, several very obvious differences, including different, misaligned head decals, mismatched flipper buttons, and marks on the cabinet. Even the auction description was way different from what was received. This was a classic bait and switch, and the reason for the delay in shipping the game now seemed pretty obvious, they had to find one to ship!!!!

He was tempted to just make the best of it, but as he got further into the game, it became apparent just how poor quality an example it was, so he filed a paypal complaint and started down the painful road to send the game back and get refunded. Because the game crossed the border this was much more complicated than just the shipping, I'll skip the details, but by the time the dust settled my friend was $1500 poorer with no game.

Unfortunately, the auction has now disappeared from Ebay as it took forever for the final claim to be settled.

I hope that this was just an isolated incident, but I thought it should be brought to light, this kind of thing should not happen, but when it does, the seller needs to be held accountable.

No, it didn't discourage him at all, he's going full steam ahead. Fortunately he was able to stand on principle and could afford to take the financial hit. One of the main reasons I posted this was to alert others, as this kind of thing could be devastating financially to some.

The most unfortunate thing in all this was the unrecoverable costs, brokerage fees, shipping and taxes. He may still be able to get the taxes back, but they don't make it easy, and after a while you just get worn out trying.

A first experience like this might have discouraged most people, but not him, he's bought some very nice games since then, including another Indy, and made out just fine.

I know how you feel, I've been doing this for 25 years, and he's 1/5 of the way to me in 5 months! Nice thing I get to play the ones that he has that I don't!!