As you probably know by now, I moved back to the UK a couple of months ago, after spending over a decade of my life living and working in Southern California in the videogames industry. During that time, and indeed, for many years before, I had shaken off my prepubescent urges to not pay money for games and hadn't really given it much consideration until recently.
Upon arrival back in Blighty, I found myself in need of a PAL Xbox 360 for personal and work purposes. So I began the lamentable task of buying my third operational Microsoft console, but there was no way I was going to pay full whack for this one. After a few days of Internet-based searching eBay was looking like the best way to go, and after missing out on some pretty good auctions I finally won a used, reconditioned machine. I paid around £50 for the barebones 360 with a/v cables and the all-important 50Hz UK power brick. Not a bad deal -- it's even got four months left on the warranty, apparently.
I'm pretty sure there's something dodgy going on in this naked mobo photograph.
As I'm wont to do, my obsessive nature didn't stop me from torturing myself by searching for other machines for sale even after I'd won and received my new -- well, old -- hardware. It was only then that I started to move away from eBay's legitimate listings and headed into the realms of private free ads on Loot.com. Loot is almost like a UK version of Craigslist, and is geared to folks advertising junk for sale. I'm pretty sure it's not regulated at all, because I quickly found inroads to the seedy world of console modding in nearly every personal ad posted relating to videogame hardware sales.
For every poor soul trying to legally sell their Xbox 360 Elite and collection of 20 boxed games, there were at least three or four dubious ads for chipping services, DVD-ROM flashing services and so on.
