Anatomy of a Ripoff

Scammers are hoping that folks looking to buy electronics on the cheap will be fooled by a network of bogus shop sites. The mother ship is nanoelectronics.com and the templated affiliate sites include:

harbourelectronics.com
electronicsrs.com
fashionboudoir.com
electronicsready.com
zack-electronics.com
otek-electronics.com
alliedelectron.com
wizzardelectronics.com

...and more.

The sites involved use physical snail-mail addresses from legitimate companies within the mom & pop service industry. For example, harbourelectronics.com claims their address is 2614 Simpson Ave, Hoquiam, WA which happens to be the real physical address of the legitimate http://harborelectronics.net. A related example is alliedelectron.com which uses the physical address of 7410 Pebble Dr., Fort Worth, TX, taken from the legitimate Allied Electrons (another seemingly mom & pop style service industry business and one which doesn't even seem to have its own website). Looks like the scammers must be working from a hardcopy of some service industry directory.

Note the identical template used by the family of scam sites. You can see a whole bunch of them at this Google query.

Consumer complaints found via Web searches indicate that after placing an order via credit card, the goods never arrive. Allegedly, contacting the company results in customers being told that the order must be paid via Western Union. According to reports, those who do pay via Western Union are also never shipped the goods (so basically it's just a way of stealing their money). Those who initially provided their credit card have complained that their credit card was subject to repeated unauthorized charges ranging from $5 to over $500.

According to Robtex, the IP is 124.217.252.129 and resolves to:
GTC-MY-PIP-AS Global Transit Communications - Malaysia 18th Floor, Menara Aik Hua Cangkat Raja Chulan 50200, Kuala Lumpur Malaysia +60 3 2031 4988 (Tel) +60 3 2031 8948 (Fax)

Ironically, the scam sites are displaying the McAfee HackerSafe logo. Of course the logo is a counterfeit and it links to a spoofed page (http://harbourelectronics.com/security/scanalert/rating.php). A legitimate HackerSafe logo would lead to mcafeesecure.com and not to a page on the host site itself. The scammers are doing this because consumers mistakenly believe that the presence of the HackerSafe logo somehow makes them safer on that site. But while the psychological benefit may help the site gain credibility, the presence of even a legitimate HackerSafe logo doesn't mean customers of the site are better protected. Just ask customers of HackerSafe customer geeks.com who reportedly had their credit card info exposed a year ago this month.

Comments

[Deborah]

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Deborah

http://termlifeinsurance2.com

[electronics]

Nice writing. You are on my RSS reader now so I can read more from you down the road.

Allen Taylor