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In today’s world, everything you could ever want or need can be found, bought and paid for on the internet, making it a playground for fraudsters. They’ll be as creative as they want when it comes to coaxing people into parting with their money. No time for guilt or remorse when you’re a scammer!

Today, we’ll present you with two online tricksters who’ve been at large on the world wide web and made maximum use of its advantages.
The first number 0019518883614 belongs to a certain „Mr. Smith“(this isn’t the creative part) and it comes from California, USA. Apparently, Mr. Smith would like to buy a car and would prefer to do it in the UK, for whatever reason. He favours the advertising site Gumtree to reach his victims.

You have to be careful here. If you want to sell some things on GUMTREE then you also can be a potential victim to this plot. Usually it hits those who want to sell something big like a car.

This number will send you a text containing the following email addresses and wants you to reply. You can just as easily send messages in Gumtree but of course that doesn’t fit with the plan.

[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]

Writing back means that he has your email address and step one of this two-step scam is achieved. Step two is convincing you to pay with PayPal.

If you answer his text, you’ll get to hear a longwinded story involving in-laws and presents and being out of town… meaning that the payment has to be done via PayPal. At this point, anyone can see that something doesn’t add up. If you Google the number, you’ll see that it’s from the USA, so why get a car from the UK? Making a payment via PayPal in these situations is not recommended at all – there is a long history of cases like this where people have been tricked out of their money.

Being vigilant is always recommended whilst on the internet and this is especially true when buying and selling. Our second number 01612127403 is from Manchester, UK. In this case, cash is the goal once again but the tactics are different. In one scam, they offer marketing services but once you’ve paid up, you won’t hear a dickybird from them…

I got a call from a man claiming he represents Online Platform Management Consulting. We talked a little while and I agreed to pay for online marketing. I proceed with the payment and tried to contact the same number back but it was no longer active.

Another technique they use is posing as Google, threatening to remove an address from their listing. Though this technique isn’t really that smart, it’s still fairly creative.

What scammers want is money and personal information. We’re all inclined to believe it would be hard to get hold of these things on the internet but it can be all too easy! Don’t let your guard down and always think twice before disclosing sensitive or important information.