Beware Amazon sellers who lure you away from site
THERE are only 10 days until Christmas, so still time to get ripped-off – especially if you’re buying a present online in a hurry and don’t spot the warning signs of a scam.
The good news is that I’ve just had one dodgy seller removed from Amazon. The bad new is that there will be others.
I was drawn to what looked like a bargain price for a camera after hearing from one poor shopper who paid £840 for a Canon EOS 5D.
Harry Johnson got nothing in return, not even excuses. The crooks simply stopped replying to messages after they’d got his money.
Amazon protects buyers with what it calls an “A-to-Z safe buying guarantee” – but only if you make the payment within the Amazon platform.
Harry, unfortuantely, was tricked into paying through money transfer.
He had no reason to think this was odd because the information he was being sent by the seller, ScElegance, looked as if it was coming directly from Amazon.
The crooks even had the audacity to quote Amazon’s guarantee in the message that gave the bank transfer details which would lure Harry into paying outside the site, invalidating that guarantee.
“Being a trusting family, we both took the scammers advice on the payment process as gospel,” said Harry.
“All the paperwork looked genuine so we completed the purchase.”
S c E l e gance had vanished when I looked on Amazon for the same Canon camera, but another seller had popped up that also stank.
This one was called nikkimcg2 and the first red flag was the price. The seller had the camera up for £725.80 compared to nearer £2,000 for most other sellers.
Nikkimcg2 had a range of other electrical goods for sale, all suspiciously cheap, like a Microsoft Surface laptop at £554, compared to the more usual price tag of £1,000 or so.
The feedback was also highly dubious. This appeared to be a busy electronics retailer, but most of what little feedback there was dated back to 2005 and was not for electronic goods, raising the suspicion that this was a dormant account that had been hijacked.
Crooks do this through phishing, sending officiallooking messages designed to get the recipient to reveal personal account details.
I emailed Nikkimcg2 asking for its business address and VAT number. No genuine business would object to revealing these, but this seller would not supply them.
Finally, there was the biggest red flag of all.
Every single item for sale was supposedly new, so the “condition” box required just a single word. New.
But Nikkimcg2 had written an email address in this box, saying you should use it for orders. ScElegance had done the same thing, which was how Harry was lured off the site.
Amazon says it does not discuss individual cases such as Harry’s, but it did remove Nikkimcg2 from the website after I raised it.
In a statement it said: “Payment within the Amazon.co.uk site is the only authorised and recognised form of payment for items sold by sellers on Amazon.co.uk.
“Every customer who orders on Amazon. co. uk is covered by our A-to-Z guarantee; however, items paid for outside of the Amazon. co. uk Marketplace aren’t eligible for protection.”
Similar rules apply on eBay, which says: “Always complete your transaction on the eBay site – otherwise, sellers can operate outside of eBay rules and policies and you won’t be eligible under the eBay Money Back Guarantee.” Action Fraud has issued a warning about fraudsters operating on the Facebook Marketplace. The crooks advertise goods for sale but come up with excuses for not being to accept payment via PayPal, which offers some protection, and they also won’t meet in person to accept cash. “In all the cases reported to Action Fraud, fraudsters have been offering items for sale and demanding that payment is made by bank transfer,” says the warning. It gives the example of a victim who paid £105 by money transfer for an iPad Air. Depending on the model these normally sell for £200 to £400. “The victim never received the iPad and the fraudster blocked their messages,” they said.
The first red flag was the price – £725 compared to usual £2,000