That broken link someone sent me actually led to a great deal on a used truck

My neighbor Charlie kept sending me these links from a local classifieds site that looked like they'd been through a blender. The URLs had random letters and numbers, and half the time the pages wouldn't even load right. He told me it was a glitch in their system that showed items before they got posted publicly. I laughed at him for three weeks until I clicked one and found a 2018 Ford F-150 with only 40k miles for $12,000. The ad disappeared an hour later but I already had the seller's number. Anyone else stumble onto something useful through a completely messed up link?

2 comments

2 Comments

eric_johnson5d ago

My uncle actually ran into something similar but it was with a completely different type of link. He got a text from some random number with a broken redirect to an auction site. He almost ignored it but decided to mess around and add a missing slash to the URL. Turns out it was a small estate auction in his town that nobody knew about because their website had a coding error. He snagged a vintage table saw for like $80 that would have sold for ten times that at a real auction house. The whole thing makes me wonder how many treasures are hiding behind glitched out servers and lazy web developers.

lily5745d ago

That reminds me of when @eric_johnson my buddy found a rare vintage guitar on an old broken Craigslist clone site that had a typo in the domain name, it was only up for like ten minutes but he scored it way under market value.