a scam

side note: somebody is currently reading every entry in this blog… i noticed this last week when there’s suddenly a huge spike in my site stats. heh.

whomever you are…. *waves*

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it started during our ride back from Ulu Dong, Raub. my BIL made his desire known to sell his Vitara for a better, larger 4WD. the one flaw (or perfection, depends on how you look at it) my father  has is that he works too quickly. sometimes too quickly that you have no time to really think about what to do.

Dad scoured the web and found an advertisement in mudah. i don’t know what happened in between, nor i was privy to the communication between dad and this fellow. i had some idea of this only when dad showed our lawyer the copies of the communications he had with this fellow.

it seems that this fellow is selling his car way below the market price (like 15k lower) and this car is currently with a forwarding company (based in Italy). an interested buyer will have to pay a deposit of RM 8k (i assumed for booking) and the car will be released to the buyer for inspections. if the buyer is satisfied with the conditions of the car, the balance will have to be paid within 2 weeks.

the fellow did forward a copy of the forwarding company’s profile (i assumed because i did not get the chance to really look at the details before all these started to unfold). dad had taken the bait and both of my parents were already at the Western Union to bank-in the deposit.

when i found out that mom was about to pay the deposit, i google-d around, looking for signs of fraudulent or scheming in this whole scenario.

Lo and behold, pages after pages, stories after stories i read telling the same MO; how these frauds schemed people out of their hard-earned cash!

my mouth suddenly felt dry, blood drained out of my face. i felt like vomiting. with trembling fingers, i texted my mom telling her to hold off paying the deposit first before we get to the bottom of this.

i was lucky. from the moment i heard about the decision to bank-in the deposit to the moment i realised that this could be a scam, it was roughly around half an hour before i finally trusted my gut feeling (and google, of course) and informed my parents. in that half an hour, mom could have paid the deposit and lost all the money!

but, Allah helped us from making a huge mistake, and made paying the deposit so much harder that it supposed to. i was told that my parents had filled in a wrong form so they would have to fill another form and queue again.

after all the hassle and my uneasy feelings, dad decided not to pay the deposit yet until he can check further.

so he did and later decided, yes, it was a con job.

be very careful when it comes to online purchase/transactions. double and triple checks the legitimacy of the sales and always, always trust your gut feelings.