I Found My Dream Shoes At A Price That Was A Steal. Literally.

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“All human suffering buttons itself to the pang of wanting.”― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

So there’s this style of sneakers I’ve been wanting for months now. I glance with ill-disguised envy at the feet of other women wearing them. I need a pair of those sneakers.

Well, okay. Not need, in the sense that I go barefoot in winter. Or that I don’t already have sneakers of my own. Several pairs, in fact, which are admittedly still serviceable.

But my shoes are so last year (or year before last, or maybe the one before that). They’re okay for walking the dog, but nowhere near as cute as the ones I have my eye on.

I have a trip coming up, and a pair of those new sneaks would be just the thing to clinch my capsule summer wardrobe.

The problem is, they cost what a similarly thrift-conscious friend of mine would call “a shiny penny.” Like everyone else who’s not a member of the oligarch class, these days my shiny pennies resemble the ones we placed on railroad tracks when we were kids. Back when lightly supervised Boomer babies did such things.

Like those ancient pennies, my present ones have been stretched and thinned under the weight of an on-rushing economic engine.

Also, while I know it’s old-fashioned of me, I balk at spending that kind of money on what we used to call tennis shoes.

So I’ve been stalking online shoe retailers, investing more time and energy than I care to admit in hopes of finding a flash sale on that particular brand and make, a smokin’ hot deal upon which I can pounce.

Of course, as those shoes are popular and in demand, their prices remain nearly equal across all the legitimate sites I haunt. My pursuit of them has become something of a low-level, in-between-real-tasks, obsession.

And that, reader, made me a perfect target.

I was actually close to pulling the trigger on a pair at full price, on an online platform I know and trust. But just to make sure, I did a quick Google search for the make and style number, and whaddaya know, there they were on another site for less than half what I was about to pay.

My fatty little bargain-hunting heart beat faster. But I’m no dummy (I thought). I was careful to investigate to make sure the offer was legit, even though the retailer was a well-respected one that I’ve purchased from in the past.

I won’t reveal their name since what followed was in no way their responsibility. They mostly sell scrubs (nice ones) to medical pros, a few sets of which I bought during Covid when I worked at a public school that had reopened before the vaccine was available. They also carry a limited selection of shoes. Including, behold, the very ones I lusted for.

At a low, low price! So much lower that I went a further step and checked their site with TrustPilot, which gave it a confident rating.

So I bit. I selected the shoes in my size (that part was oddly confusing, which should’ve been a red flag), and put them in my cart. The purchasing portal looked like any other I’ve used, so in went my credit card number and security code. Flush with the prospect of finally obtaining Those Shoes, I pushed the button.

And then, spinning. Spinning and spinning, just like my stomach had begun to do, until a message popped up saying my card couldn’t be verified and I needed to enter a different one.

That, I knew, was more than a red flag; it was a flag on fire. Looking at the url with a closer eye, I saw that it contained three extra characters than the real site it had, I now suspected, cloned.

I closed the browser tab and smote my forehead.

Then I went to the actual site — which, I’m telling you, looks precisely like the cloned one — and yep, there were the shoes I want. At the real price.

I didn’t buy them. How do I deserve such footwear when I’m too credulous to avoid such a swindle?

All I could hope was that, since the transaction hadn’t gone through, everything would be okay. There was, after all, no way to scrape back the data I’d just offered up.

For a few days, all was well. It did seem weird when I got a text from someplace called Boss Casino saying it needed to verify a $745 payment, but I quickly deleted that and reported it as spam.

Turns out there really is, or at least virtually is, a Boss Casino, a “social sweepstakes site” and I don’t hesitate to use its name because it and its ilk — online gambling hustlers, no matter what they call themselves — are evil and a blight on society.

This I know because the next day, as my husband was reviewing our online bank statements, he noticed that the credit card balance, which we’d just paid off in full, had nearly a dozen charges from, you guessed it, Boss Casino, including the one for $745. Together they totaled just under $7,000.

Once we’d both expended our reserves of expletives, I told my husband, “I know how this happened.”

Because here’s the thing, and this is the part that really makes me cringe. Not two weeks ago, a good friend of mine had to cancel her credit card because she’d been caught up in the same kind of scheme — this time, involving a hair color product she couldn’t find anywhere else that was now available online at a price so reasonable she bought it in bulk.

But instead of the sale going through, she got the spinning thing, and then the demand for another card, and a few days later, she realized her card had been hacked.

And she’d told me all this.

Luckily, we bank with a local credit union that is highly responsive and employs actual, compassionate humans. They immediately froze the charges and canceled the card. I was issued a new one that afternoon.

That means that whatever automatic payments I had set up on the old card will have to be rejiggered, which is a pain. But not as painful as being out $7K, or feeling as stupid as I do.

I’m telling this story because making their victims feel shame is a con artist’s most powerful weapon, and I refuse to take the blame for their duplicity.

Maybe I can spare you, or someone, the same experience.

One tip: if you find what you want at a price that’s almost too good to be true, it is.

I still want those shoes.