At times, I take things too seriously - as happened recently when I tried to sell my laptop. Within hours of my putting it for sale on ebay, somebody by the name Niraj Jain had purchased it, and I was thrilled. So far so good. What you wouldn't have expected me to do, however, is the little bit of sleuthing that I did last night, stretching into the wee hours of the morning.
I unearthed what would have been a perfect crime but for a tad bit of oversight - the e-mail ID from Western Union was not quite from Western Union (www.westernunion.com), but from Westernunion-paymentonlines.com. But for the disturbing nugget of doubt about this e-mail ID, I'd have taken their bait hook, line and sinker. On hindsight, it turned out to be a good thing that I had purchased some talk time on Skype - it helped me call up Western Union's customer care, and when I asked them to run this e-mail ID through their systems, they came up with zilch.
Yet another dead give-away was the telephone numbers. The buyer had given me a telephone number for contact, and so had "Western Union" in their e-mail, along with the name of a person in their "customer service department" - Russel Simmons. The remarkable thing was these numbers were more or less identical except for one or two digits. When I tried dialling the buyer's number through Skype, sure enough, the call couldn't go through. One of my UK friends was on-line, and I sought his help. He tried and reported that it was a private line - that is, the line itself was owned by the called party or something like that - and that it would cost a great deal of money to simply make a call to it.
There's more. Another e-mail, this one purporting to be from Swift Courier International, which informed me that though they have a demand draft for Rs.52,000 in place, it would be on hold until I gave them the airway bill number for the shipment of the laptop. "This would ensure that while your money is on its way, the buyer's laptop is on its way too, thus preventing any fraud". How ingenious, and totally credible! That part of the fraud came unravelled too when I called up the customer care department of the *original* Swift Courier International (yes, it does exist and is head-quartered in the UK - the same country where the buyer claimed he was currently staying), and they couldn't recognize the "reference number" that was given in the e-mail.
The icing on the cake (or the final nail in the coffin, whichever way you choose to look at it) was the domain name (westernunion-paymentonlines.com) itself - it was a "personal address" on MSN, whatever that means (see attached screenshot). The domain name for the Swift Courier's e-mail was msn.com too, and when I checked the headers of both e-mails, sure enough, Hotmail servers were involved!!
I shudder to think of the loss I'd have had to suffer had I not seen through things when I did. The whole scheme was incredibly well-organised and I doubt if someone less alert (and less knowledgeable about domain names, etc.) would have even seen doubted this till it was too late.
Just to make things clear, eBay is a wonderful place to buy and sell items, especially when you can't afford advertisements in your local newspaper. Unfortunately for us, the Niraj Jains of this world are far too cunning and prepared, and unless you stumble on to something like I did, the chances are you're likely to get swindled big time.
Moral of the story: eBay advises buyers and sellers to avoid on-line payment systems like Western Union, and I am beginning to see why. When scam artists (yes, they have made it a fine art) go to such great lengths to make the whole thing look so credible - even including a shipping address in Nigeria - it does make sense to use eBay's own payment mechanism, and / or on-line bank transfers.
And never, *ever*, ship out anything unless you've got the money safely in your hands. Unless, of course, you have so much of the stuff that you don't mind losing some. In that case, my phone number is .... and you can call me any time of the day or night to relieve your monetary burden :-)
P.S. Yet another moral of the story: If you're in India, want to talk often to your friends who are staying abroad, and don't want to go out of your home looking for a VoIP phone booth - and you wouldn't want to, I guarantee you, at 1:30 a.m. - get yourself some talk time on Skype. Take my word for it, it comes in handy.
