attempted fraud, eBay user "lind6c9" (www.geico-tr.com)

[crazyaboutnachos]

Executive summary: www.geico-tr.com is a fraudulent site and eBay user lind6c9 (personal email lindscaping@live.com, goes by Daniel T) is not to be trusted. It might be a hacked or hijacked account, who knows, but not trustworthy.

The full story: I posted a nice, moderately expensive Tiffany & Co. ring on eBay and user lind6c9 contacted me directly with a pretty generous offer.

There were a few weirdnesses about the way this user was communicating: offering a good amount of money without even asking me any questions about the item, or trying to redirect communication to a private email rather than thru eBay's communication system (he claimed he was out of office and I would have to email him on his Blackberry). But the user had a good eBay rating, so I trusted him for a bit.

Things took a clear turn for the worse when he offered to use www.geico-tr.com as the escrow company. I looked at the site and although it seemed legitimate at first, I noticed the website domain name was registered in late Nov 2011, despite the fact that the company claimed to be doing business for years! "whois" also listed that domain name was registered for 1 year, not the customary 5 years for legitimate businesses. Also, they were listed as a registered escrow company with non-existent government bodies. Clearly it was a fake site.

What made me convinced I was being defrauded was that the buyer claimed he already did 4 transactions with them and he's been using for a long time. But the domain name has only existed for a few days.

After pressing the user with questions about this, and trying to return the conversation back to eBay's communication system where there would be a record of our dealing, the buyer eventually became non-responsive.

I did not go through with the deal, which is why this is (fortunately) ATTEMPTED fraud. But I have a ton of red flags on this deal. If lind6c9 is a real person (or a hijacked account) and would like to defend themselves, please contact me through eBay (my usename is crazyaboutnachos, just like this account), and I will post an update in this thread.

Hope this helps someone out there, especially since there is no record of geico-tr.com whatsoever anywhere on the web, as far as I can tell.

[lightfair]

Hello,

thank you for your detailed description. I'm really happy that you did not fall for this scam. I also noticed that you posted this on the ebay message board: well done!

As far as the account from which you were contacted goes: This was indeed very likely hijacked/hacked; the account history for this account and the "modus operandi" of this particular scammer certainly suggests so. Which means that you definitely should contact ebay and make them aware of this issue so the account can be restored to the original owner.