The "My current location is Scotland" Scam

I have recently been involved in online fraud where the fraudster used the email address [email protected]
They have used other email address using Alice as well as using other names such as Sarah and Evelyn.

On contacting the seller, the same email is always received:

"Hello,
The ?????? is still for sale in excellent condition, with no damages or any faults. All necessary documents available. My current location is Scotland due to my work commitments. If this is going to be a quick sale, I will let it go for £???0 delivered at my costs."

Unfortunately, you are led to believe the transaction will go through paypal and are fooled into paying via bank transfer to an account under a, what appears to be, Romanian name.

I am 17 and I had saved up for many years to buy my first car; all of which was lost in an instant.

Although many have failed, I will not let this lye and will be contacting watchdog and my local mp.

I have also set up a facebook page which I hope many of you will join and help me raise the awareness of the situation nationally.

Here is the link https://www.facebook.com/actionagainstfraud?fref=nf

PLEASE LIKE AND GET SHARING,

Thanks


If anyone has been involved with the same scam please contact me with details of your scam!

I would also love to receive advice into how I should proceed and the likely success of contacting my local mp as well as watchdog

Welcome to Scamwarners shales96.

If you take a look at my thread

http://www.scamwarners.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=82849

.. you'll see that I have been recording this gang's activities over a long period of time, as have other members of this forum and members of other forums. I can point you to a thread at the Legal Beagles forum who have also been involved in this.

The major means to defeat this criminal activity is to make potential victims aware of this fraud and I do it by detailing the 100 or more fraudulent adverts this gang post daily on the Autotrader UK forum. I restrict my activity to cars and this one ad site, though we know that they operate on every major ad site including Ebay and Gumtree and they don't restrict themselves purely to UK ad sites.

I'm not very impressed with the actions, or lack of action, by any of the organisations who could do something to prevent this criminal activity and I'll be diplomatic in not saying anything further, but once a victim has paid a scammer the chances of him getting his money back is virtually nil. It is only by victims getting together and lobbying their MP's that anything can be done about this but it has always been the case that victims are only interested in what will get their money back and not the general public interest.

My apologies if I'm blunt, but that's how it is. I am happy to help and assist in any way that I can but I'm cautious about my identity for obvious reasons.

It must be devastating for you, as it is for everyone who has been scammed by these people. The same gang also set up websites selling agricultural and construction machinery, mainly targeting East Europeans and many of the victims have come to this forum.

Of course the first step is to report it to Action Fraud here

http://www.actionfraud.police.uk/report_fraud

.. and get your crime number. Of course this achieves nothing and there are doubts that doing this even gets the crime added to national crime statistics. There has been a recent scandal about a serious fraud that appeared in UK national newspapers that AF had marked 'no action to be taken'.

The next step is to ensure that the bank account is shut down so that it can't be used again. How they get these bank accounts is a whole new topic I won't get into for now.