The trio of Nicolae Cretanu, 30, his 23-year-old wife, Adriana, and George Titar, who made nearly £300,000 duping thousands of people into buying items that did not exist on eBay, were jailed on Friday for carrying out a "well planned and sophisticated fraud".
The Romanian husband and wife team would advertise on eBay for variety of items including cars, concert tickets, among others. Most of these goods were imaginary. The couple would then wait till the end of the auction, after which they used to contact unsuccessful bidders and offer a "second chance" for buying.
They used 12 aliases to hoodwink over 3,000 unsuspecting shoppers across the world. The scam’s success was largely due to the fact that buyers on eBay are required to pay before they receive their goods.
They also managed to exploit the eBay site as most of its customers’ e-mail addresses are available with it. As an eBay spokesman said,: "The criminals used the site to gather information and initially to contact their victims but carried out the fraud separately, beyond the protected environment we provide". ‘Protected environment’ is the point beyond which the website is not responsible for the transactions carried out.
The conned customers would then transfer the cash to England using Western Union money transfer. The fraudsters used a host of counterfeit passports and identities to collect the cash from Western Union's outlets. George Titar was in charge of collecting the cash.
Chief Superintendent Nigel Mawer, head of specialist economic crime unit, Scotland Yard's said though £300,000 in this case was "but a drop in the ocean" as compared to the estimated £1bn a year, which was being swindled from people across the globe, "eBay scams form a substantial part of that".
The racket was exposed after it raised suspicions among the Western Union staff, who alerted police. The trio were then arrested following an investigation by Scotland Yard's economic crime unit. They have also been served with deportation notices.
eBay also announced that it was going to follow suit in Britain of banning payments through Western Union, as is being done on their US site, eBay.com. A spokesman of eBay apologised, on behalf of the site, to all who had suffered through their associations with them. He said: "These transactions did not take place on eBay and as soon as we were made aware of them we took action. By working with the police we helped ensure that the prosecutions were successful, showing that crime does not pay on eBay".
Posted
on : Sat, 29 Oct 2005 13:10 GMT | General News
By : Mike Lawson
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