Page 10 of The Hampton Beach Café 6
With a sigh, she entered her next guess, PropertyKing69$
'Log In Successful!'
Frances felt her lip curl as she shook her head in disbelief. What a child that man was proving himself to be!
Once she was logged in, she started searching through the messages. She found several messages from potential buyers, all making low-ball offers on the property. But what surprised her was that Clarkson wasn't even replying properly to them. He was just sending generic responses or ignoring them altogether.
“No thanks, don't bother countering, too low,” she read aloud. “What the heck is he doing?”
Clicking away from the messages, she opened up the account settings to see what details he was using.
“Jonathon Clarkson,” she muttered. “How original, your middle name strikes again.”
Frances wondered why he was even bothering with it at all.
An email address piqued her interest. It wasn't one she had seen him use before. Narrowing her eyes, she copied the address and opened up the server.
'[email protected]', she pasted it into the username field, sighed, and entered PropertyKing69$ in the password box.
Blinking hard at the 'login successful' screen, she was almost lost for words.
“People really don't get the whole, 'don't reuse the same password over and over again' thing, do they?” she muttered as she opened the inbox.
Most of them were notifications for the messages she had seen on the site, but there were also direct emails about it too—all with similarly ridiculously low offers.
As she was scrolling through the emails and skimming the subject lines, a live chat notification popped up on her screen. She hesitated for a moment, unsure if she should read it.
“You've already broken into the email, Frances,” she scolded herself. “Now you're getting all ethical about it?”
She clicked the notification.
“Hello, I'm interested in the off-market café offering that I saw on your insider’s website. Can you tell me more about it?” the message read.
Frances took a deep breath. It was one thing to know Clarkson was scamming her but to be right in the middle of it was—
Wait, insider’s website? What's an insider’s website?
Her fingers hovered over the keys. How could she ask this person for more information without letting on that she wasn't the person they thought they were talking to?
They were typing again. She could see the little dots bouncing up and down, so she decided to wait to see what they had to say.
“Property ID 0003245, my user on site is GunnerBKing,” the message read.
“Gunna Be King? Way to make Clarkson hate you,” Frances muttered.
She noticed then that the property ID was actually a hyperlink. Without thinking, she clicked it.
The new tab opened to show a gorgeous listing with up-to-date photos and extensive information about how well the café was doing—not the shoddy copy and pre-renovation photos of the public listing.
The website had fully loaded and showed Clarkson's face in the top left corner, sunglasses, and bright yellow baseball cap askew.
“Property King Insiders—Getting The Latest and Greatest Before The Plebs,” Frances read the tagline aloud, her stomach twisting in disgust. This must be his members’ club that he mentioned.
What was Clarkson doing, and didn't this guy say off-market?? It couldn't be off-market AND listed...
“I'm sorry, but the café is not currently for sale,” she typed, her temper getting the better of her. “Taking it off the market.”
The person on the other end of the chat seemed surprised. “Really? That's disappointing. I was prepared to make a seven-figure offer for it,” they replied.
