U.K. man gets revenge on Internet thief via Shakespearean text messages

“Where for art thou PlayStation 3?”

A U.K. man certainly seems pleased with himself after taking revenge on a man who sold him a PlayStation 3 over the Internet.

Edd Joseph, 24, of Bristol, purchased the PS3 game console for £80 ($148 CAD) from a seller on Gumtree, a site where classifieds can be posted for free. However Joseph never received the PlayStation 3.

He paid the seller using a direct bank transfer, but according to the site’s policy, bank transfers are unacceptable, giving Joseph no protection when the seller failed to send him his purchase.

He even went to the police who said his chances of catching the seller was slim and did little to help him.

Joseph contemplated the idea of finding out where the guy lived, but he didn’t want to be creepy. Conscience doth make cowards of us all.

He decided instead, to attempt to drive this man completely crazy via text messages.

When Joseph discovered he could copy any amount of words from the Internet to his phone and simply place them in a text message, his brilliant plan for revenge became clear.

“It got me thinking, ‘what can I send to him’ which turned to ‘what is a really long book,’ which ended with me sending him Macbeth,” he said.

While Joseph sends the play's text as one text message, the victim can only receive that message in 160 character chunks…meaning this guy's cell phone will be going off a lot.

Joseph has decided to send the entire works of Shakespeare to the seller, which will come through in 29, 305 individual text messages. To check them, or not to check them…that is the question.

The average Shakespeare play is 22,600 words. So far, Jospeh has sent 22 plays, including Shakespeare’s longest play, Hamlet, which was sent in a whopping 1,143 text message saga.

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After his phone was buzzing for hours, the seller began to respond to Joseph with abusive text messages.

“Recently he has taken to calling me and giving me abuse on the phone. I tried to ask him if he was enjoying the plays, but he was very confused,” said Joseph. “I’m going to keep doing it. If nothing else I’m sharing a little bit of culture with someone who probably doesn’t have much experience of it,” he added.

Joseph was never really a fan of the Shakespeare plays until now and he especially has a new appreciation for the long ones.

In the words of Mr. Shakespeare himself, all’s well that ends well.

Too bad for this Internet thief, it doesn’t look like the text messages are going to end well anytime soon.

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