Hi, i am writing this as victim of escrow fraud, and completely embarressed that as an intelligent person (or who i thought was intelligent) has fallen victim to a car sale scam. As prior to the "sale" i googled everything about the sale hoping to find any shred of evidence that it might be scam and did not, this is why i am publishing the details of the scam in an attempt to prevent it happening to someone else, if these scammers (to put it politely) use the same info again.
The car was an Alfa Romeo 156 for sale on the Vlan.be website, it was nothing spectacular in terms of out of the ordinary, car wasnt a too good to refuse deal, Kms and age matched pretty well to the others for sale that we had seen.
The story was ok from the seller Tobias Noffke, but was based in sweden. Happy to pay for shipping or come and pick it up, on agreement of a price, he arranged the shipping, and as we could not get cheap flights we agreed, and the details sent through with his contact information of: Odengatan 38, Sweden.
Then we received from the shipping company: Eurostar Courier Ltd , www.eurostarcourier.com details of the agent and payment details, via their customer service; eurostar-courier@consultant.com, his details were Josep Orson, 236 Holloway Rd, London, N76SE. with a contact number of 07765073481 and +47765073481. We also had spoken to someone else in the office a Stuart Reilly[/b.]
As i said, i googled everything, but found nothing, the website was very complex, but in hind site i didnt match the phone numbers!!
They had an Australian office and a London office and even gave customer testimonials.
[b]Civic Centre Building
445 Kenton Road
HA3 OXY
London UK
Europe
Level 18
204 Elizabeth St
Sydney South
Sydney
NSW 1235
Australia
I know this is indepth but there is more... on paying a 50 percent deposit (silly me) we received a request for additional funds of the price of the vehicle to cover the insurance. At this point the alarm bells were ringing, but we requested evidence of the vehicle, they sent through a copy of the contract that they had with the seller, this was signed by the company manager Lorand Anderson. We decided to cancel the order as it did not conform to the conditions of sale that were sent through, and a full refund was to be returned, yeh right!! still havent seen the cash, its gone.
I have just seen on this website, the same couriers set up as barten-trans.com, a fake.
I hope this helps someone else!!