An image from the hard-drive of the man who “sold faulty laptop”

This site tells part of the extraordinary story of how one man - Thomas Sawyer - was sold a non-functioning laptop on eBay, failed to get redress from the seller, and devoted his energy and resources to using the internet to damaging Tofangsazan’s reputation.

The laptop seller, Amir Tofangsazan, lives in Enfield, North London. Before he sold the laptop, he used it to store scans of his passport, his and his mother’s banking details and photographs he had surreptitiously taken on the tube of women’s legs. Sawyer started posting these to his blog.

The topic has become a touchstone for many people who are annoyed about dodgy eBay sellers. It has become a kind of viral lynching of Tofangsazan.

What is intriguing about this is that it shows something we have working on with our corporate clients, which is that if there is an existing conversation (eBay fraud) then a single campaign - even one as idiosyncratic as this - can become an internet phenomenon.

The comments section 960 comments! (When I started writing this story it was 831)

There is a wikipedia article here.

The Google search has 40,000+ entries.

Via Antony Mayfield

The Overture search inventory tool is one of the great little secrets of the internet. For those who have not discovered it, you can find out who is searching for what around your topic and use the information to drive your paid search choices.

We have been reviewing a particularly sulphurous quantity of consumer-generated feedback on behalf of a company which has incurred the wrath of consumers, and trying (on their behalf) to figure out what advice we should give them about managing the situation. The volume of complaints made us think it was worth looking at traffic on Overture, which captures Yahoo! searches. Fortunately it hasn’t quite got to that pitch yet.

But, intriguingly, several other companies figure in the context of the term “complaint”. Here they are in order of the most complaints. We have linked to the page you reach if you follow the link.

There are some observations one should make about this list. Big companies are more likely to figure on it than small ones. Yahoo! is going to be there, because it is Yahoo!’s website. Tech companies are more likely to figure than non tech companies. The two tech companies eBay and Yahoo! have even thought about this search and ensured that they have pages with information for customers there. eLoan complaint appears to be such a popular term that it is spammed, judging from the search results page. Pay Pal, despite being part of eBay, seem less well prepared and their number one result is Pay Pal warning which is a forum for people with cautionary tales of dealing with the company.

Vonage, Wal-mart, Cingular, Herbalife, Bank of America and McDonald’s would be well-advised to think about this search in the context of their web presence and provide customised landing pages answering the issues that consumers and journalists may wish to raise.

The Overture results on the word “complaint” point again to the undoubted lesson that if you are in customer service the search engines (Yahoo! in this case) are doing the job for you.