New victims of Escrow fraud

[Haylabamba]

Hi
We are feeling pretty sick and stupid having fallen victim to an Escrow fraud and losing circa £15k which we cannot afford.

We responded to an advertisement on Autotrader for a BMW X5. I carried out an HPi check on the vehicle and all seemed fine. We contacted the "seller" a "Mr Terry Cross on terry.c.66@live.com who referred us to his shipping agent on http://www.ccmmarcel-shipping.com they were also on http://www.ccm-marcel-shipping.com. The website was very professional and convincing and provided the ability to "live chat" with operators at the agent.

We were given a delivery date and tracking number to allow us to track the progress of the shipment and delivery was scheduled for tomorrow (16.02.2010). Out of interest, we checked the site late on Friday to check progress........The website had gone.

Payment had been made by bank transfer to a branch of Barclays in London (Willesden Green).

The fake web site seems to be protected from "Whois" queries by using myprivateregistration.com a service provided by Melbourne IT
http://www.melbourneit.com.au I would have hoped they would be able to provide the police with details of who registered the site but it seems not so far.

We have informed the police, trading standards and the banks fraud department but not expecting much to happen now.

If anyone needs any more information or can offer any further advice, let me know
Richard

[lightfair]

Hello Richard,

I'm very sorry to hear you became a victim of this scam.

Both sites are in our database:

http://escrow-fraud.com/index.php?page= ... ta&id=9963
http://escrow-fraud.com/index.php?page= ... ta&id=9969

Those entries also contain the screenshots for both sites.

It's a big and ongoing scam; this particular layout/design hs been used a number of times before. Examples include:

http://escrow-fraud.com/images/test/ein ... ot.com.jpg
http://escrow-fraud.com/images/test/ein ... rt.com.jpg
http://escrow-fraud.com/images/test/wor ... rt.com.jpg
http://escrow-fraud.com/images/test/ibe ... es.com.jpg
http://escrow-fraud.com/images/test/mun ... ce.com.jpg
http://escrow-fraud.com/images/test/esp ... ss.com.jpg
http://escrow-fraud.com/images/test/das ... ng.com.jpg

and several more.

Both sites were hosted at Yahoo and taken down shortly after I reported them. This leads to the WHOIS protection issue. Usually those domains are also registered through Yahoo; and when Yahoo suspends them the privacy protection is lifted and the domain is locked. However: Sometimes the domain registration will be completely erased; and unfortunately this has happened in those two cases. For the investigation those entries are probably not too important, because in 99% of the cases the data is fake anyway (it's either completely invented or identity theft). But somewhere this data is still stored and if the police requests them they probably will get them.

As far as I can see you already did all the necessary things (police, bank...). You might want to inform the police that this is large-scale organized crime, most likely from Eastern Europe.