Don't buy LD's from blankx@hotmail.com
Gradiva
Hi, Just letting you know that this guy has become an internet-renowned con and
scam artist. Please, please, everyone on the newsgroup, save your money and do
not let it go to this kid (he's probably 19 or 20). I have met him in person in
San Jose, and he is one of the most immoral persons I have ever met. (go to
dejanews.com and search for bla...@hotmail.com, or his other aliases, which are
listed later in this post).
He works at Hollywood Video in San Jose CA. The number there is:
(408) 378-7741
The address of his apartment is:
1065 Ranchero Wy #15
San Jose CA 95117
His phone number is:
(408) 241-6910
His aliases are:
Greg Terry
Greg Felix
Archer Troy
Elijah McHugh
Some of his previous e-mail addresses:
spar...@pacbell.net
mr0...@pacbell.net
I can't believe that he still running his scams, but the San Jose Police
Department has been reluctant to follow my case against him. Oh, and his real
name IS Greg Felix.
-Thanks-
Matthew Garrison McNeil
Gradiva
Hello,
Why are some of you oblivious to my warnings? Just look up his e-mail address
at dejanews, and maybe the several dozen people there will dissuade you.
Anyway, if you’re curious, here’s the story:
Last year at this time (that would be September, 1997), I responded to a LD NG
post of his, selling several Criterion boxed sets (sound familiar?). I sent him
+$130 for the Rock and Pulp Fictions CC's. For weeks, and then months, he kept
putting off sending them to me. In the mean time, he sent repeated e-mails
containing all sorts of tapes with production cuts of various films, scripts,
and the like. As a FOOL, I sent him in total another $180, in faith that he was
legitimate. He in fact never sent ONE THING. It so happened that during
Christmas break, I went with a friend (Nick Zeltzer) to visit another friend at
Stanford (Paul Kerschen). San Jose is just a short trip away, so we decided to
track him (Greg Felix) down. When we found him, at his apartment where he lives
with his Mom, he completely denied who he was. He said that Greg was his
brother, but I told him that I recognized his voice from a phone call I had
made several months earlier. He had made one big slip in his whole scheme: I
was the only person who had his home phone number, which he had probably given
to me on accident. Anyway, he said that the number was not to his apartment. So
Paul walked down to a pay phone while we waited outside of Greg’s apartment. I
asked that he let us inside, if only because the phone was going to be ringing
soon. He denied again that the phone number was his own, but let me come inside
with him. There were mailing boxes strewn throughout his room, and there were
also several laserdiscs on a low shelf in his closet. In no time at all, his
phone rang, and Greg’s face plummeted to the floor. Greg answered the phone and
at first pretended that it wasn’t Paul, but I could hear Paul laughing on the
other end of the phone. We now went outside and argued for several more
minutes. He still claimed not to be Greg (there was a box with his name on it
laying on the floor). My friends and I decided that we’d go to the police
instead, but when we began to walk away, Greg ran after us in fright, and
pleaded for us not to go to the police. He said that his brother is always
getting mixed up in various deals, and using all sorts of pseudonyms. He
claimed his brother was working on the backlot at Disney (or was it Paramount?)
at the time, and that he was an emergency script doctor. He promised he’d get
the money he owed me (now $350), and to meet him at Hollywood Video (where he
had his “day job”) the next afternoon. My friends and I left Greg’s apartment,
and drove over to the Hollywood Video where he claimed to work (after all, this
was probably a lie, too). There, we asked several employees about him- they
said he worker there, but that they couldn’t give us any information on him. We
waited a couple of minutes until the store was closing, and one of the managers
came out and talked to us about him. He said that Greg was always having
“suspicious” packages shipped to their store under various aliases, but that
since he hadn’t caused much trouble, they had never asked him about it. So I
told the manager my story about how Greg had ripped me off over the Internet,
and the manager didn’t act surprised. He said that Greg once claimed to be John
Travolta’s illegitimate child, and that he was working at Hollywood Video just
to keep in tune with “real life.” He also claimed to have a close relationship
with Tom Cruise, and that on weekends and vacations, he was often called in by
several of the studios to do major script doctoring. He could give us nothing
else on him, so we drove back to Palo Alto. The next morning, Nick and I drove
back to San Jose to meet with Greg. When we approached the front of Hollywood
Video, Greg ran across the store, jumping into the window, screaming and waving
his hands. He obviously didn’t want us to come into the store. We waited
outside, in the mean time taking black and white photos of him as he carried
videotapes from the outdoor drop-off bin to the inside. Over an hour later, he
came outside and told us that called his brother, and that all of the discs and
things he owed me were on there way, and had been shipped from LA yesterday. I
asked for a tracking number (he mistakenly dropped that the package had been
shipped UPS), so Greg went inside and came back out with a shipping number
written on Hollywood Video stationary. Nick and I walked over to a pay-phone,
and called the UPS tracking service. They had no record of the shipment, though
they said that if it had been shipped within the past 24 hours, that it may not
show up in their system yet. We were now stuck- surely this was a bluff on
Greg’s part, but we hadn’t yet figured out how to call it. We theorized that he
indeed may have sent a package (full of nothing), just to get us off of his
back, so we walked around to all of the area UPS shippers. None of them
remembered a person of Greg’s description mailing a package, so we were again
lost as to what to do. We walked over to a Bank of America (my bank), and I
inquired about the possibility of bringing fraud charges against Greg. I
figured that the checks I wrote to him must have a paper trail, but my bank
informed me that as long as I signed the check (which of course, I did), there
was nothing they could do- I validated the payment. Just when it looked as
though our luck was running out, I had Nick call UPS and inquire about the
possibility of finding the origin of the package through its number prefix. UPS
was very helpful, and informed us that the beginning parse, after the letter,
was a shipper number. It turned out that the shipper was one Hollywood
Entertainment of Willsford Oregon. It also turned out (we had a much more
helpful operator) that the package in question had been mailed several weeks
ago, and was received by one Hollywood Video of San Jose California. Greg had
taken the number off of a package which was simply laying around in the store.
We walked back to Hollywood Video, and when we got there, Greg ran outside to
meet us. We informed him that we has disseminated his plan, and although he did
not admit to lying for one second, he told us to wait for another hour and meet
him in front of the Save-On which faced his store. We waited, and about a half
hour before the appointed time, we called the San Jose Police Department, and
had a unit meet with us (and Greg). Greg arrived first, telling even more lies
of epic proportion. He told us that he had been called in for some serious
script work on Face-Off, and that in one week he practically re-wrote the
script. When we asked him about the significance of the theme of Castor and
Polix, which runs throughout the film, he grunted and had absolutely no idea.
He spewed off miles and miles of B.S. about the phony life he only wished he
had led, and when the police came driving towards us, he almost had a mental
break-down- and threw a temper tantrum like a little child. In front of the
police, he promised to pay us the money as soon as he got off work, and that
he’d meet us at this exact spot at 7:30 PM, that night. When the police left,
he began swearing under his breath, and whining about how we may have “screwed
it all up.” We left- Greg walked back to Hollywood Video. At 7:30, we waited in
front of the Save-On, and low and behold, Greg drove up with his girlfriend in
tow. He was panting and whaling, telling me that he only had some of the money-
just a little over $100 (probably his allowance for the month), but he did have
a bootleg of the long Apocalypse Now, and the LD’s: The Rock Criterion and the
Pulp Fiction Criterion. He also had an ad-hoc document he had invented, saying
that none of this had ever happened, and made me and a friend sign it. We did
it willingly- how could none of this have happened if I now had a document
swearing (with Greg’s signature) that is did. I was ecstatic! I went to Office
Max with him and got it photocopied. While I was inside, my friends inspected
the discs- they said that the discs looked good, except there was a giant
scratch on one of the Rock discs. Greg swore us all to silence, a silence which
we now had Greg’s signature on (yes, his official name is Greg Felix). Anyway,
we let him go, but only before one more catch... Before we drove back to Palo
Alto, I pulled out the last disc of the Pulp Fiction Criterion- on the B-side
label was a heat-sensitive sticker. It seemed Greg had been negligible- he
forgot to peel off the last sticker on the disc from whatever video store these
discs had been taken. Although exhausted, we called around to the other video
stores to find out which ones rent laserdiscs. The Blockbuster close to Greg’s
Hollywood Video did, so we paid them a visit. They had never owned the two
titles Greg had given me, but they told us of a major LD-renter several miles
away called Laserland (408) 253-3733. We arrived just in time for closing. We
inquired about the two titles, and by mere coincidence they had both been
checked out that day. We told them the funny story about how a kid named Greg
Felix had just sold us those same titles in a parking lot close to there- and
by chance- they had the same heat sensitive stickers which Lasserland puts on
all of their new LD’s. I gave the titles back to one of the employees, told her
to have a nice day, and gave her a sheet of paper basically explaining the
story, full of e-mails, names, addresses, and phone numbers. The owner of
Laserland later tried pressing charges against Greg, but they (the PD) deemed
the incident too trivial. I tried bringing a civil case against him through the
mail, but so far, nothing has come of it. Thanks for reading the long-winded
account of my personal odyssey into the world of Greg Felix. I hope all of you
never have to pay Greg a visit, but if you do, tell him I say hi.
-Thanks, and keep your eyes out-
Matthew Garrison McNeil