Hi Candy;
thanks for the additional information. I'll address your various points now.
candy wrote:The seller of the van is calling himself Lewis Hamer and the email address he is using is
splhavwfever@hotmail.com. I am still in contact with him at the moment as I had agreed to go ahead with the purchase. The said shipping company emailed with details showing that Mr Hamer had paid for the shipping costs, his address in Spain and also details of the bank acct where I should post payment to. They even sent a tracking ref number,it all looked very genuine.
Yes, of course it has to look genuine (at least to a certain extent); otherwise no one would fall for it. Many of those sites are done quite professionally - but they are still fake.
How do these scams work?. Is it the seller thats actually behind the website?.
Yes, more or less. This is actually organized crime, mostly operating from Eastern Europe (mainly Romania). So you have a gang in which one person might create the fake web page, another might run the fake ads on various platforms; and even other people (often in a different country) collect the money and send it back to the home country.
So the scam works like this: The "seller" posts an ad (actually he usually posts dozens if not hundreds of such ads) offering a car (or an expensive laptop/tv/...) for a significantly lower price. Usually the story revolves around the "fact" that he bought the car in the UK but cannot use in his current country because of the steering wheel bein on the wrong side (or vice versa for ads on the continent). He then goes on that for safety reasons the buyer is supposed to send the money to a shipping company which would hold it in escrow until the car is delivered. However (as you already figured out) this shipping company doesn't exist (except as a web site); and so the money is gone immediately. In many cases the money is sent by Western Union which is practically un-traceable.
Here are two other short descriptions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogus_escrowhttp://www.ic3.gov/crimeschemes.aspx#item-8The link you gave me to look at in your reply I didn't quite understand, does it mean that this website just keeps operating but is continually changing its name and appearance?.
In a simplified way, yes. Actually there are a number of "templates" for such fake sites that are used over and over (as this particular one: over 500 times documented in our database, but most certainly used even more since we don't catch each case). This doesn't mean that this has been the same scammer all the time - but it means that this single template has been used for fraudulent purposes over 500 times already. As I said earlier: This is organized crime and there are various groups and gangs. To give you an idea of the scale: Our database now holds over ten thousand entries for fake sites (of course, most of them killed). I'm trying to send 10 reports a day; but there are certainly more fake sites registered each day. My estimate is about 20 to 30 new fake sites appear each day.
We manage to have to hosters kill most of them within a very short time, though (many don't last much longer than one or two days). At the moment
http://www.trans-international-uk.tk/ doesn't load because the actual content for the site was killed. It might reappear though.
Sorry for my ignorance I'm a little wet behind the ears on how these things work,I just wanted to try and understand it all a little better so I don't get blagged again in the future.
You're doing fine. I'm glad you did some research before sending any money and found us. If you have additional questions don't hesitate to ask.
Posted: Mon May 31, 2010 10:45 pm