Three-year-old buys $12,200 excavator on website

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), a newspaper reported 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.

Mum Sarah Quinlan knew about it when she got up and went to the computer.

‘I saw an e-mail from TradeMe saying I had won an auction and another e-mail 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 e-mails 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.