This isn’t as weird as the girl who got a cryptic, anti-capitalist note instead of her iPod, but it’s potentially far more damaging. This guy bought a refurbished iPod Touch through Buy.com for $99 — what a deal, right? As it turns out, not so much. It was infected/infested with a trojan that quietly installs a backdoor on your Windows system. Nasty.
He contacted Buy.com and they quickly sent him a brand new one, then Buy.com contacted the factory where it had been recertified. They concluded that it was “not a significant problem that is happening with any frequency at all.” Reassuring. Personally, I’ll be reformatting every piece of used hardware that comes my way from now on.