I once did a similar thing. It was the time when e-gold was being the new craze and HYIPs were all over the place scamming people. I had read about how it worked and how people were being scammed by offering to exchange Paypal for e-gold for a 50% premium (too good to be true, right?)

Well I found this guy in a forum who said he would exchange me about $1500 of Paypal for $1000 of e-gold and I accepted the deal. He sent me the money to a bogus Paypal account I had just opened and I never sent him the e-gold. Of course he either made the payment with a stolen CC or if it was his own he could easily do a chargeback and keep the money, while egold transactions are absolute unreversable.

A few days and several threatening emails later, the Paypal money was gone from the account for some unspecified reason. I could have transferred it to my bank account and let Paypal worry about getting it back (as I read some people did and actually got away with it without ever reapying Paypal), but making money wasn't really my intention, just to break the scammers balls a little bit.

As a descendant of a Hungarian family your comment makes me want to puke. Your beloved USSR is THE cause that Eastern countries today have the enormous debt they are struggling to somehow repay. For decades the country was kept up (bordering misery) on sovereign debt.

Of course capitalism isn't going to solve everything overnight, and is still quite shitty for many people who have kept the communist attitude of "daddy state will provide".

And I won't even get started on the rampant lack of any basic liberty or human rights which was the norm at the time. My family was stripped of the lands and other possessions which they had earned through hard work because they were tagged as "dirty capitalists".

True, capitalism sucks, but it's still the less bad system anyone has discovered.

I think after a certain age it's more about mental exercise than physical exercise. My father is 85 and he's still intellectually brilliant (for example he only discovered the world of computing a few years ago and I have to say he is now quite computer-literate), but his physical abilities are somewhat limited, like for the 95% of people his age. Sure, he can still take care of himself, go for short walks or swims, but that's about it unless you have practiced sports very actively during all your life (and even then most doctors won't recommend it because of the risk of a heart attack).

In contrast, many other people of his age that I know are declining in all aspects because after retiring they stopped doing anything mentally challenging, mostly limiting their activities to sitting all day watching TV and meeting fellow elders in the pub.

Another good example I can think of is Irving Kahn, the oldest broker in Wall Street, who is 106 years old and still works actively in his investment firm, without even thinking of retiring. I bet if he had retired at 65 or 70 he would be nowhere near so healthy as he is today.

I live in Spain and my girlfriend is in USA. I've tried to send SMSs to her cellphone (yes, it's GSM!) from different spanish operators and she won't receive them. However, I was still billed by my company and when I called them they told me it was all a question of agreements between the different companies, and that it's up to the user to make sure these agreements exist before sending the text message.