I've been asked by a friend to publish the following:-
"We have what we know is a scam operating from a man in Middlesbrough (Mark Heslehurst) whereby he is asking for (and receiving) money, via the Internet, claiming it's to reunite him and his small son living in Cambodia. He tells people the son is ill; that he and his Mother are living in poor conditions as refugees, etc. I did some digging and found that his ex-wife, as she now is (Dominique Dufieux - google her and see), is living a good life there as a lawyer and the child is well - she takes him on hols all over the world! I also found he did the same scam in the USA 2 years ago. The police looked into it and decided he was not breaking any law because he himself actually states that the money will be used for adverts in newspapers and that he will tell his story world wide - which in turn might make the PM in the UK help him get the child back here! As long as he believes that will happen - he is OK! Money is rolling in - but I am like the proverbial dog with a bone and I won't let him get away with this. People in Harrogate and Birmingham (where he tried to get money earlier) contacted me and we are determined to expose him."
You receive a letter saying that your child's school has entered his/her poem for publication in a book. You can buy a copy of the book for only £xx.xx plus postage. Is this a scam?
Truth is, it's a rather clever moneymaking scheme but, at the same time, it's quite legitimate. If you think the price is affordable and that it might encourage your child to write, then there's no shame in buying a copy. More...
From Pete:-
I publish this in the hope that it might help prevent readers from being similarly scammed, as has just happened to my son.
He had just returned to university a few days ago after working an internship at David Brown Gears during the summer, and was looking at cameras for sale through "Gumtree" - a classified ads website - with a view to upgrading his current digital camera, when he was distracted by an ad for a brand new, unopened, Retina MacBookPro going for only £800. He decided he had to have it.
Now, my wife and I were on holiday and I knew nothing of all this, otherwise I could have advised him that it was probably a scam and not to touch it with a ten-foot barge pole. In actual fact, he had contacted my wife and asked her if he could borrow the money to buy it, paying her back when he got his wages. This, they both kept from me, fearing I would veto it (the amount of stuff that goes on behind dads' backs is amazing, don't you find?!) Besides, we had enough on our plates as number-two son had just lost his wallet on the Isle of Wight and we were frantically trying to cancel debit cards, etc.!
To get back to the story, my son rang the mobile number on the advert, and it was an Orange Ansafone message - as it was every time he rang it. The people on the other end always replied by email.
Turned out that they were selling the unopened RetinaMBP on behalf of their wheelchair-bound auntie who had somehow got it and didn't want it, and the seller didn't want it as they were happy with their current MBP. (Yeah, I know - it gets worse!)
At this point, my son made his interest clear and they got down to business. Apparently, they didn't accept Paypal; they didn't accept credit cards; and if you wanted to pay cash on collection, lo and behold they lived right out in Crediton in Devon - enough distance to prevent most people from collecting! They only really accepted direct bank transfers.
Don't get me wrong, alarm bells were ringing in my son's head - just not loud enough to stop him wanting a RetinaMBP!
He got the address in Crediton, and then asked (all this by email, remember) for proof that they lived there as he was worried about sending all that money to a complete stranger. By return email he received a scanned gas bill with the name Heather Jones on it - the same name he had been dealing with. He decided to take the plunge and transferred the £800 into the account they had given him. Bye-bye, money. Bye-bye summer wage / loan from 'Bank-of-Mum'! Bye-bye camera.
No more emails. He was now getting frantic, and after sending more and more emails, containing more and more pleading for the money back, he finally received one more. It just said something about sex and travel, and the letters "LOL".
Calls to Gumtree's 0845 number were fielded with an 'out-of-hours' notice. Calls to NatWest seemed to hold out hope as both my son's account and the crook's account were with NatWest. The fraud department there took all the details and they said all the right words, but to be honest they probably then put the report at the bottom of a very large pile of similar please for help after they'd hung up.
The police in Devon listened and then confirmed that no such person lived at that address. Furthermore it was the address of a hardware store. He was then given the number of a fraud investigation department of the police and had a long conversation with them during which he could tell the whole story. Then came the hardest phone call of all for my son to make - the one to me.
As luck would have it, I was only about 80 miles from Crediton at the time, and considered a drive round there, but me going to jail for assault with a baseball bat would have just added to the problems, let's face it! So, it occurred to me that Heather Jones might not live there, but she *might* work there and so I found the number of the shop and rang it from the top of the cliff facing Durdle Door in Dorset asking to speak to Mrs Jones. "Is this about the iPad?" the man asked, "I'm sorry but someone is using this address in his scams". Turned out that other people had been going through the same amateur sleuthing that we had been doing after being similarly duped. It seemed that the last scam had been for an iPad, and now a RetinaMBP. The police had been informed by the keeper of the store. One woman had put £500 into an account for the iPad and not received it, and a couple of chaps from Manchester had thought better of paying out the money to strangers and had actually driven all the way down to the address only to find out they had gone on a 'wild goose chase'.
We then knew that all was lost.
The scammer is probably working something like this:
1. He gets a free pay-as-you-go sim card and uses the number in his advert. He then makes sure he never answers the call, asking that interested parties leave their email addresses on the ansafone.
2. He uses a free yahoo.co.uk email address (along with hotmail, googlemail, gmail, etc., the scourge of the Internet!)
3. He sets up a bank account - possibly using the identity of someone whose details he acquired from a previous scam*
4. When he's lured some people into parting with their 'hard-earned' he empties the account and closes it. Easy to do online. He closes the email address and moves onto another one. He then chucks the sim card, or even the whole phone away and forgets the misery he has inflicted, moving onto his next prey.
*Let's face it, he now knows my son's name, AppleID, email address, bank account details, address, mobile phone number - surely enough there to possibly use for the crook's next scam!
For days you are racked with rage and thoughts of getting even with this pond-slime, but to be honest, all you can do is chalk it up to experience and make sure you are never caught out again.
Please don't be caught like this. If something is too good to be true, it usually is.
Pete
