We hear of a cautionary tale from one of our readers who was nearly scammed when she attempted to sell an item of jewellery on the Asiaxpat website. She posted her item and when a buyer contacted her, sent it off to California. She then received a strange looking email from the buyer using Standard Chartered letterhead.
The item was being sold for US$2,000, but the buyer's email claimed that this amount was too low to be wired, and the bank required another HK$14,500 to enable the transaction to go through, which would be returned after the transaction was completed. The obvious craziness of this suggestion alerted our reader that something was wrong and she was fortunately able to contact UPS and tell them not to deliver the item.
Another woman was not so fortunate and explains on the website how she recently fell for this scam.
Asiaxpat founder Paul Luciw said there is a warning on his website against conducting transactions with overseas parties. He said that over the past three weeks there had been a marked increase in the number of attempted scams from people coming on to the site from overseas. He said the website had barred a number of addresses but people were clearly changing them and reregistering. But he said as a result of the recent surge in scamming activity, Asiaxpat had started to block the IPs of suspect users.
"Since the introduction of this latest measure, there has been a decline in the number of complaints," he told . " I expect they are targeting other high traffic sites that have large volumes of classified ads."
In one of the threads on Asiaxpat that discusses scamming, one writer notes: "If anyone sends you a message and just asks you to email them back, then 99.9 per cent of the time they're scammers. With all the years I have been dealing here in Asiaxpat, all of the deals are dealt with using mobile messaging services or by private message in this forum itself and never via email."
