How The FBI Conned An Auction Escrow Con Artist
from the there-goes-that-MSNBC-again dept
MSNBC absolutely loves these online scam stories. They’ve posted a bunch about auction escrow scams, and apparently that alerted one seller of some Cisco equipment to be suspicious when he suddenly received a large order, with the request that the deal happen through an escrow site. It sounds like the guy who set up the scam wasn’t all that bright about it. He gave a bogus address that the seller’s brother-in-law checked out and saw was fake. He also had registered his “company” domain name the same day as he registered the fake escrow site domain name – and used all the exact same contact info. The seller quickly contacted the FBI and they set up a sting which caught him. Good to see the scammer get caught, but I’m sure there are plenty more out there who are working on making the scam even harder to trace. Just another reminder to only use legitimate escrow services that you know are real.
Comments on “How The FBI Conned An Auction Escrow Con Artist”
Stupid scammers
The article mentions the URL of the
site, which (as of Sat Feb 15 02:24:33 GMT 2003) is still up.
Google tells me the scammer copied http://www.americanescrow.com/ without even noticing that it was a relocation company and not an escrow service. Furrfu.