To the current owner of Raffiki - possible fraud?

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ontheplane

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I know the owner of Raffiki was a regular here.

Don’t know if he still is or if he still owns it, but there appears to be a fake listing on eBay for it.

I’m not going to report him to eBay for a few days - but if this is your boat and it is NOT for sale i’d Try and track down the lister and see if you can report them to the police - far too much of this going on now....

BOAT CRANCHI 32FT CRUISER TWIN VOLVO DEISEL | eBay
 
I know, but by reporting it, it just gets removed - wish eBay would just try and catch these people at it!

I’ve used a duff email to contact the “seller” see what happens
 
These idiots spoil it for everyone.

I was going to offer to pay a deposit, then get his bank details then report to police - however now eBay will just pull his ad.... I do think when fraudulent ads are reported eBay needs to do something. Often it’s a hacked account that is used, but at some point the scammer is weak, and that’s when they ask for money - cos they have to give some info, even just a paypal account. I don’t know if PayPal accounts can be traced, do you have to give an address to open a paypal account.
 
ontheplane said:
Noooo I was going to try and find out a bit about the seller, now all that will happen is the ad gets pulled and he never gets caught....
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And while you're playing around trying to be clever, how many of his other 1,930 items (all with exactly the same expiry date/time) will hook some naive punter?
 
fwiw, not much by the looks of it, Paul, the owner of another Rafiki has sold it. But it was an Azimuth f/b not a cranchi open...
 
The seller has several similar fake ads posted, this is a common type of fraud on autotrader as well.

it looks as though a genuine ebayer has had their account hacked, to provide cover for the fraudster.
 
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This seller, using multiple accounts he appears to have hi-jacked, has been doing this for literally years. Look at his eBay “other items” and he’ll be listing at least 60 other high value items too, mainly boats but other high value items including collector cars too. I’ve goven up reporting his auctions to eBay they do sweet FA apart from pulling the auctions. Occasionally a game will be played before the listings are pulled with people bidding really high prices just to neautealize the auctions I suppose. I first noticed him when he listed a Moody 33 in Greece many years ago - he’s still listing it this time around.
 
ontheplane said:
These idiots spoil it for everyone.

I was going to offer to pay a deposit, then get his bank details then report to police - however now eBay will just pull his ad.... I do think when fraudulent ads are reported eBay needs to do something. Often it’s a hacked account that is used, but at some point the scammer is weak, and that’s when they ask for money - cos they have to give some info, even just a paypal account. I don’t know if PayPal accounts can be traced, do you have to give an address to open a paypal account.
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Do you suppose the police will give it their immediate attention. And until you pay him some money has he broken any law? Yes he has broken eBay rules.
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E bay are not interested, it would be easy to pick this up the moment the ads are posted but it costs them little so it carries on.

Try to get a contact to view a legitimate item and they are onto you in a flash.

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I really don’t know the real law but common sense would suggest he’ s misrepresenting ownership of the items in order to sell them to his financial advantage - that has to be a crime surely? It’s fraud or at least my understanding of fraud.
 
Wandering Star said:
I really don’t know the real law but common sense would suggest he’ s misrepresenting ownership of the items in order to sell them to his financial advantage - that has to be a crime surely? It’s fraud or at least my understanding of fraud.
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I am no better informed than you. However until you have paid money over I think he could turn away without having committed an offence. He has lied, but is lying a criminal offence?
 
Caraway said:
I am no better informed than you. However until you have paid money over I think he could turn away without having committed an offence. He has lied, but is lying a criminal offence?
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Well if he has no title or right to sell the items he's listing, then that sounds like fraud to me. But unless anybody can point to any of those items, and say for certain that it's not his, it doesn't give the police much to get hold of. I'm sure in my own mind that he is attempting to defraud the gullible, and that a transfer of funds wouldn't be matched by a transfer of goods. But it's hard to prove until it happens, unless you can demonstrate that a specific item definitely belongs to someone else.

There's nothing to stop anyone else reporting to the Police - and there's an argument for doing so just to keep the crime figures up. But I suspect the police will just mark it as "no crime".

Similarly there's nothing to stop the OP (or anyone else) attempting their sting. Even when Ebay eventually take the ads down, you can carry on as if unaware. Let us know how you get on.

I hope that Ebay are doing more behind the scenes than we can see. But in the meantime, getting the listings removed asap seems the responsible course of action, to minimise the chances of innocent buyers being conned out of their money.
 
Attempting to obtain pecuniary advantage by means of deception is a criminal offence yes.

There is also the offence of conspiracy to defraud by means of misrepresentation.

And I agree - it's the same bloody idiot (I guess because the picture of the "contact details" are always the same even if the actual email is different.

What I don't get is how they put in all this effort and seemingly get away with it time after time. I can only assume that the idea is to phish - either for emails, bank account details, or to get people to pay deposits. I cannot imagine someone would transfer the money for a whole boat until they'd seen it...?

I'd love to catch someone doing something like this - it's just a pain, when you search eBay and they have had one of their "listing sprees" because almost every cheap car and boat is fake!!

Such a pain in the a** plus someone somewhere could lose money to these morons.
 
Don't understand why EBAY etc don't have at least a moral obligation to facilitate catching some of these jokers, or is it because it embellishes their platform with lots of listings, ergo fees !!.
 
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