Amazon Adventures - Part Deux

Finally, here is the much promised second part of my recent Amazon Adventures. I warn you now, this is going to be a long post, you have been warned! ;-)

Part one can be found here.

This part is going to cover my recent adventures when trying to sell some things which were excess to requirements using the Amazon.co.uk Marketplace, which works a bit like eBay, but without scammers and con artists popping out of the woodwork every few seconds; or so I thought. How wrong I was to believe things would be any better on Amazon.co.uk's Marketplace than eBay.

The tale unfolds below:

So, as I mentioned above I had some electronic and other goods that were excess to requirements, these were in immaculate [almost new] condition as I had treated them with respect and care at all times. So, I created a Marketplace account on the Amazon.co.uk site so that I could offer these items for sale. This step was dead easy and I had a Marketplace shop open on Amazon.co.uk within five minutes. I confirmed this by searching for one of the items on Amazon.co.uk and it appeared [along with my Marketplace seller account name] in the new and used listings.

A few hours passed and I started to receive e-mails from prospective buyers of the most expensive of the electrical items I was trying to sell, here's a screenshot of one of the e-mails:



I replied promptly and gave the prospective buyer the benefit of the doubt, even though alarm bells were already starting to go off in my head. The next morning I received the following e-mail from 'Vannessa' [screenshot below]:



Hmmm.... I thought that is most interesting, especially as I had also received another e-mail which claimed to come from Amazon.co.uk payments e-mail address, or did it? Here's a screenshot of the e-mail below, notice anything odd?:





Looks real doesn't it, but is it really from Amazon or not, yes or no? [Hint look at the e-mail address shown between the '<' and '>' characters.

Anyway, even though by now I knew it wasn't really from Amazon.co.uk as the real e-mail address it came from was 'amazoncustoms@accountant.com', which is a FREE e-mail account from 'Mail.com' in the US. I decided to check my account on Amazon.co.uk Marketplace, and as expected the item was still listed as being available, not sold. At this point I decided to do a little more detective work.

So, to start my digging, I did a lookup on the UK Post Code given by the 'buyer', this being 'BL2 1LW' which resolved as the following address:

13 ST AUBINS ROAD
BOLTON
LANCASHIRE

Now, if you noticed the 'buyer' claimed her address was '13 st aubin road', notice not only the lower case, but also the missing 's' off the end of 'aubin'. By now I was fully convinced that this was a scammer trying to defraud me of my electronic device. So, I replied to her, see the screenshot below:



And 'Vanessa' replied thus:



In between the various e-mails, I did a bit more digging and found out that the address was the registered office for a company which has now been 'dissolved'. So, to turn the screw a little tighter I sent a reply which you can see below:



And 'Vanessa' replied thus:



And thus, about 15 minutes later
:


By now I think that 'Vanessa' knew that I had rumbled that this was a scam, or that she was getting desperate, so to try and string her along a little longer and see if I could extract a telephone number from 'her'. Here's the e-mail I sent:



I never expected to hear anything more from 'Vanessa', so I was rather surprised when I got the following reply:



Those of you that live in or know the phone number system in the UK will have immediately noticed that the phone number I had been given, was not in Bolton, or indeed anywhere near there. It was in fact a London telephone number, and a quick bit of digging unearthed the fact that it was a BT Pay Phone! Game, Set and Match to me, I think.

Further digging, seemed to indicate that the phone was on the West side of Lambeth Bridge, in Horseferry Road, which ironically, is less than 300m from New Scotland Yard!

My next move was to send all the data onto the fraud department of the London Metropolitan Police, as far as I was concerned, my job was now done, it was now down to the Police to apprehend the fraudster(s).

Over the next week, I received four other similar fake Amazon payments notices, needless to say, I played them along the same way and then sent the data onto the authorities to act on[*]. However, I'm not holding my breath, as these frauds are small fry in a world of sharks.

Needless to say, I finally decided that using Amazon.co.uk's Marketplace was not a good way to sell expensive electronic items, in fact I'd go as far as to say that it is only marginally better than eBay in this respect. I must make it clear that my comments are only about my personal experience of using the Marketplace feature of Amazon.co.uk, I have found all my other dealings with Amazon.co.uk to be safe and reliable and I generally trust them far more than other online stores. In fact they are one of the stores I use the most when I'm thinking of buying things, be it CDs, Books, Electronic Items or whatever.

[*] I also e-mailed and spoke to Amazon.co.uk's fraud team a number of times while these adventures unfolded, they were polite and efficient, but I was left feeling that they were not at all surprised about this level of fraud on their site, and seemed to have no answer to the problem. The problem seems to be worse when selling high value electronic items, such as phones, pdas or game consoles.