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Common Sense Lesson #153

ebay.jpgWe’ve told you before that when you’re planning to commit a crime, you need to cover your tracks. Don’t leave a “weapons to buy” list lying around, don’t ask your neighbor to watch your kids while you go a-killing, etc. It’s just poor criminal sense. And another one of these rules you need to follow is this: If you’re planning to make illegal drugs, don’t use your own account to purchase the ingredients on eBay.

This is the lesson that 29-year-old Carl Andrew Dubois has learned, now that he’s been arrested for making Ecstasy. The Colorado man not only got all of the ingredients he needs off of eBay (using a Pay-Pal account of course tied to his personal credit card), but his e-mail address was the rather on-the-nose “freebasing@hotmail.com.” When he and his girlfriend were arrested a few weeks back, the cops found enough stuff in the house to make over 50,000 tabs of X, which would have a street value of a whopping $3 million.

So this lesson isn’t just about common sense, it’s about good business, since Dubois wound up taking a rather substantial loss by not following this easy rule.