Buying seemingly cheap furniture items from the Internet may appear to be lots of bang for the buck, but it can also give buyers more than they bargained for. Such was the case for a family from South Carolina.
The Johns family bought a couch from the popular classified advertisements website Craigslist about a month ago. Unfortunately for this family, the furniture came with a creepy surprise: bedbugs. The little creepers that were hiding inside the couch they bought for $225 have now infested their home.
The family's ordeal started when Katie Johns' husband found a sectional sofa while browsing Craigslist. The item seemed to be a very good deal so they decided to buy the sofa and fetched it from the seller's storage unit.
It did not take very long before the family started to notice the problems with their newly bought couch. In only about a week of using the sofa, Katie and her son began to notice bright red blotches appear on their skin. They went to the doctor, who diagnosed the unsightly marks to be likely bites of bedbugs.
The family later confirmed it has bedbug infestation.
"Turned on the flashlight and got right down beside my bed and saw one bug," Johns said. "I'm looking some more, and I see another one. I bagged five bugs."
It was also clear that the infestation can be blamed on the couch they bought from Craigslist. Johns said that when the exterminators pulled the newly bought couch apart, they found that one section was infested.
Johns said that their home in West Columbia has been torn apart over the past month because of the bedbug infestation and that their family is no longer comfortable in their home.
"When I feel a tickle on my arm, like maybe the hair on my arm moves or I have a little itchy spot, I immediately think that I have a bug crawling on me," Johns related.
The family bought the couch because of its seemingly too-good-to-pass-up price tag of $225, but the purchase eventually cost them $3,000.
Johns said that she wanted to warn others about purchasing from the same seller on Craigslist, noting that her online seller, who is known as "Rich," had other furniture items in the storage unit. When contacted, Rich said he is clueless about the bedbugs.
