Lies, more lies and deceit from an Acorn member

[Adam H]

@Mojo, he didnt generate an invoice for you via tradeshift.com did he ? Sounds extremely similar to the guy i dealt with. My first thought when he ignored calls was that how can someone be a good telesales person if they cant be reached over the phone.

@murry, I recently disputed a purchase via Bank transfer, My Bank ( Barclays ) basically told me if i raised a case with the police (which you have done)...then give them the case details they will raise the issue with the receiving bank...

There were no guarantee of a return but they seemed confident. Not sure if its because of the type of account i have with them or not but seemed pretty good. In the end the guy refunded the money as soon as i said im going to the fraud team but still it was an option.

 

[Murray]

@murry, I recently disputed a purchase via Bank transfer, My Bank ( Barclays ) basically told me if i raised a case with the police which you have done and then give them the case details they will raise the issue with the receiving bank...

I'm also with Barclays

They told me I should ring the persons bank and report it myself and there is nothing they could do

Of course when I rang halifax they told me they wouldn't take my word for it and would only look into their account for suspicious activity if contacted by the police

The police emailed me in the week with

Your report has been assessed by the NFIB and the information you provided has helped the police to begin action to try to disrupt the activities of suspected criminals. This activity could result in the closure of:

• Fraudulent websites, • Telephone numbers

• Bank accounts.

Oh great disrupting their activities, I'm sure that will be terrible for them lol

 

[Adam H]

Weird, Do you have their Premier account ? I think its like £25 a month or something. They seemed very keen to chase it up when i was talking to them about it. But their fraud team needed the police case open to get involved.

 

[donton]

I got ripped off in the last few weeks, I currently have a case open with the police via action fraud

I don't want to go in to too much detail but it was pretty much the same as you in some respects, it was a fair amount of money, low x,xxx, but for what I was supposed to be getting it was a fantastic deal

^ That's a good con mans trick I think, to get you to focus on how much you're saving rather than how much you're spending.

I offered to pay by paypal and cover fees, they said no of course, but for some reason I ignored that , so I paid by bacs which was the worst possible way since the bank can't do anything

So I wont see my money again and I doubt the police are going to do much

But I had to try and look on the bright side that at least I could afford to lose the money and it's not worth my time/health to let it stress me out

Still very annoying the first week of course, was thinking about it a lot and getting angry, but since then its got better and I feel relaxed about it now.

~ Should say this was a personal buy btw nothing to do with business or acorn

Sorry to hear about that! My company has been ripped off on various occasions via our ecommerce website (chargebacks usually), and although I never hold out much hope for help from the police they've come up trumps on multiple occasions.

The most recent one was a couple of fraudulent orders (£600 combined) - everything looked OK with the orders, nothing out of the ordinary, so we sent them. A month later we had two chargebacks as the card used was cloned, so I contacted the police who went silent for two months. Then one Saturday night out of the blue I had a call to say they had three people in custody and had seized every single piece of my stock from their property (bearing in mind it was nearly three months later, I was super impressed!)

Anyway, I've now got the stock back but the people concerned fled overseas so no further action could be taken. I started by reporting the case to Action Fraud then someone from the police picked it up and took it from there.

It's a lesson learned, we now enforce 3D Secure and so on, and manually screen all larger orders.

I wish you the best of luck with getting your money back!

 

[Murray]

I wish you the best of luck with getting your money back!

The guy I talked to when I rang action fraud (very nice guy actually, friendly and helpful) told me it's very unlikely I will see the money again

So just treating it as gone

But the good thing about money is that you can always make more

I would like to see the person(s) involved arrested and dealt with though, but I suppose it depends how clever they are at hiding their tracks

Good to hear you got your situation dealt with and your stock back.

 

[accelerator]

Then one Saturday night out of the blue I had a call to say they had three people in custody and had seized every single piece of my stock from their property (bearing in mind it was nearly three months later, I was super impressed!)

....

It's a lesson learned, we now enforce 3D Secure and so on, and manually screen all larger orders.

Good effort and well done to the Police!

Re enforcing 3D Secure ... yes, it's all about building up multiple defences and profiling ... but I guess a balance has to be struck with usability.

Rgds

 

[accelerator]

Just to say in general as well ... whilst I might have been hesitant about the increasing "Big Brother" effect that modern technology enables, the more I think about it, the more I think if you are one of the good guys it all just works in your favour. Take public CCTV for instance, I now welcome it and have no privacy concerns, it's an additional security protection for law abiding citizens.

Rgds

 

[mojoco]

@Mojo, he didnt generate an invoice for you via tradeshift.com did he ? Sounds extremely similar to the guy i dealt with. My first thought when he ignored calls was that how can someone be a good telesales person if they cant be reached over the phone.

No it wasn't a tradeshift invoice Adam.

I'm mostly annoyed at the amount of my time this guy wasted.
It's surprising the lengths some people are prepared to go to for a low level scam, the amount of time spent could have been put into something productive.

 

[ian]

It's a lesson learned, we now enforce 3D Secure and so on, and manually screen all larger orders.

I'm sure you know this, but just remember that a correct 3D secure passcode doesn't necessarily mean you are protected. Only if delivery is to the billing address.

 

[Aegean]

On a small scale, this summer I was in touch with a chap called Luke from this company: www.instantwebsitesolutions .co.uk . I asked them to throw a quick site together for one of my clients, they quoted me £600, half up front. I paid it & never received anything at all. I also paid him for a magento template which he says he bought, but I have no evidence of this.

The upshot is I received nothing at all, no mockup, no template, no design, nothing. I haven't seen anything. I asked him for a refund after 3 months, he said he'd refund me less the cost of the template. The refund never materialised & neither did any evidence a template was ever purchased.

If you receive absolutely nothing at all, its fraud. I took legal advice & then reported him to the police action fraud line, he is currently being investigated. I couldn't afford to lose that money, I know it was only a small amount but I am a one man show. My client was also (understandably) very pissed off at me for the delays with his site.

 

[accelerator]

If there's one thing in life I cannot stand, it's rip-off merchants and fraudsters.

I would advise anyone in business to work on their "profiling" skills, i.e. come up with a "system" on how to identify good and bad businesses. There are lots of signals you can look for. In fact, this area is of a lot of interest to me. One thing I've been doing lately is plugging Checkatrade on LowPrices Twitter. I don't get paid for this, it's purely because I approve of this type of business. It is making the "intelligence" available to members of the public so they don't get ripped off. I am interested in the economics of getting listed on Checkatrade. Initially it's a cost to businesses. However, it will hopefully be a "gain" for them, and it seems like win win to me. I intend to help this process and am now giving Checkatrade businesses free publicity. It's making life better for people.