Wednesday, 19 January 2011

Scam warning

I am getting an increasing number of enquiries from people who are either buying or selling amateur equipment. Someone is using my name and callsign to scam people. It isn't just me - there are lots of examples of this now.

The scam is that the seller wants you to send money via Western Union, or will send a cheque (which subsequently bounces). Their English is usually quite poor and, strangely, I don't live in Nigeria!

If you are approached by someone purporting to be me please put a comment on this blog entry. I'm not selling/buying anything at this time.

Steve G0KYA
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6 comments:

  1. M0JEK19 January 2011 at 09:26

    I think they are grabbing info from QRZ.com, such as your home address, and using that info to make their dodgy dealings look legit for punters. In a way, it is a form of ID theft. Scary!

    I was wondering when this would happen. As a whole, the amateur radio community is too trusting and open, for reasons of QSL'ing etc. Not good for these modern times.


    73

    Andre', M0JEK

    ReplyDelete
  2. M0JEK20 January 2011 at 05:52

    I wonnder if they (miscreants) are using QRZ.com or similar to grab information?

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  3. matt22 January 2011 at 16:23

    thanks for the heads up! great blog will come back 73 de matt m6ceb

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous28 January 2011 at 10:12

    So you DON'T live in Nigeria ... who knew.....

    Seriously, Good Luck with the mess these morons created...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous28 January 2011 at 14:41

    I had the same problem! a person using his name and call claimed to have a Yaesu FTM350R for sale for $378 (US dollars) the person said to send the Money to his son in the UK to some School! I bit the bait but suddenly realized total SCAM! Steve himself even emailed me and the image the person sent of the rig is on Google Images!
    Ben Murray
    KD8JBS

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  6. Anonymous14 July 2013 at 04:22

    Hams should start baiting the scammers. We respond to their scams, and act innocent, wasting their time. We set up 070 personal numbers from places like Flextel, which are expensive to dial. We should get scammers to dial them. That is what I did

    http://forum.419eater.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=230851

    and made the scammer really suffer. If more hams baited scammers, the problem would reduce dramatically.

    ReplyDelete

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