times and places

In case you didn't know (and you probably don't) I'm a cloth diapering mama. I love it. It's addictive.

Cloth diapering isn't what it was when you and I were kids, oh no. There are about a million different kinds of diapers and a million different makers. I'm a pocket user. I user Blueberry Diapers and Green Acre Design diapers almost exclusively.

I also belong to a message board called Diaperswappers, and it's pretty much what it says it is...it's a message board for cloth diapering mamas to come together, buy, sell, trade, and talk diapers. Fun times.

Recently, I wanted to try a new diaper (JamTots Berry Plush to be exact) and so I checked the ol' boards on Diaperswappers. Lo and behold a woman with the user name Pamperedshell was selling a ton. In fact, it looked like she was selling her entire stash (thats what us cloth diapering mamas call our collection of dipes...our stash).

So, like any transaction on the site, I got her PayPal address, sent her some money and I went on my merry way.

Well, a week and a half later, I hadn't gotten my diaper, which is fairly weird for that site so I emailed her. No reply. I started looking around the site and found out the worst...

Pamperedshell was a scammer. Every single one of her diapers had been sold. None had been received. And when those of us who she'd sold to got together and talked, we realized she'd sold many of the diapers two or three times over, to the tune of over $1000.

As the weeks went on we found out it went deeper. The diapers she'd sold us? She'd actually just bought off the site herself. She then claimed she never received them and filed claims with PayPal. On all of them. What that meant that normal moms who just thought they were selling diapers had their money taken from their PayPal accounts and had their accounts frozen. Not cool.

We started putting out feelers around the web and found out more. This women, Michelle Hidalgo, had actually bought diapers in brick and mortar stores as well, and then called her credit card company and had chargebacks issued or she just plain wrote bad checks for them.

Some women were told by PayPal reps that she had over 100 claims against her on her PayPal account by this time.

All over cloth diapers.

It's really frustrating because PayPal doesn't cover jack shit. They don't protect anyone but themselves. So those of us who were scammed into buying diapers she was never going to send are out money. Some women are out over $100 each. And the women who sold to her now have damaged PayPal accounts they need to fix and they are out money AND diapers.

And Michelle Hidalgo sits in her Arizona home, with all these fancy diapers, and not only did she not pay a penny for them, she MADE money off of them. LOTS of money.

The most frustrating part is that it seems like she might just get away with it. I mean, how seriously are the police going to take a diaper crime?

So there you have it. There is big money in cloth diapers, if ya didn't know. And big time scammers.

Michelle lives with her husband Martin in either Anthem or Phoenix Arizona. She's young, 25 I think, and just had her 4th kid. If you happen to live in those areas and you run into her can you ask her to give me my money back, please?