Asia-Pacific News

Three-year-old buys 20,000-dollar excavator on website

May 22, 2009, 6:32 GMT

Wellington - Three-year-old New Zealand girl Pipi Quinlan is pretty smart on the computer - too smart for her parents, who woke up one morning to find she had bought a full-size excavating digger on an auction website for 20,000 New Zealand dollars (12,200 US dollars), a newspaper reported on Friday. Waking up early at their home in Stanmore Bay, near Auckland, Pipi decided to play with the computer while her parents slept in, the Rodney Times reported. She soon found the New Zealand auction site TradeMe, which her mother had bookmarked and after a few clicks of the mouse she unwittingly made the top bid for a Kobelco digger, the most recent item listed on the homepage. The first mum Sarah Quinlan knew about it was when she got up and went to the computer. 'I saw an email from TradeMe saying I had won an auction and another email from the seller saying something like 'I think you'll love this digger',' she told the paper. She assumed she had won a Lego toy set she had been looking for, and 'it wasn't until I went back and re-read the emails that I saw 20,000 dollars and got the shock of my life,' she said. Sarah immediately called TradeMe and the disappointed seller to report what Pipi had done. The computer is now kept out of her reach, the paper said.

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Three-year-old buys 20,000-dollar excavator on website

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