Among the saddest emails I receive are from consumers who believe their problem is that the delivery of their online purchases has been annoyingly delayed.
That would be bad enough, but on reading their tale of woe and checking out the website of the “company” they paid, it quickly becomes apparent to me that they aren’t ever going to be getting that pair of shoes, or cellphone or furniture, because they paid their money to a fraudster.
There are thousands of these websites, selling just about anything you would want to buy, most of them featuring images and text stolen from the web pages of legitimate companies.
What made Maxwell of Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal’s story so frustrating is that the attorney he consulted when the goods he’d paid for weren’t forthcoming, didn’t realise it was a scam and advised him to pay a further demand for money!
Maxwell, who runs a catering company as a side hustle with his mother, paid a catering equipment supplier they found online R15,800 for plates and cutlery in early June. That included a R780 delivery fee to get the goods to them from Cape Town, where the supplier claimed to be based.
He was told the goods would be delivered within two days. When that didn’t happen, he contacted “the supplier” and was told they needed to pay another R3,600 as “delivery insurance”.
Very unhappy with that news, Maxwell lodged a complaint with the Consumer Goods and Services Ombud (CGSO), on the grounds that the supplier had violated three sections of the Consumer Protection Act. They are: failing to deliver as promised and failing to honour the customer’s right to cancel the deal and be refunded as a result; not assuming responsibility for the goods until the moment they are handed over to the customer — that is, no need for the client to pay insurance — and unilaterally increasing the quantum of an accepted quotation.
All that was true, of course, but Maxwell failed to realise that the demand for “delivery insurance” before the goods would be delivered is the classic hallmark of an advance fee scam.
The fraudsters keep demanding ever more creative fees for as long as the victim pays, in the belief that they will get the goods.
There’s a term for it: “the sunk loss fallacy”, which has the person throwing good money after bad in an attempt to reverse past losses.
Astonishingly, Maxwell paid that extra R3,600 on the advice of his attorney.
“I was advised to just pay the fee and get my goods while the (CGSO) investigation is in process,” he told me.
And of course, those catering goods are still nowhere to be seen. “It’s been over a week and I still haven’t received them,” Maxwell said. “This has caused us to incur more costs as we can't deliver on our own business promises, and damaged our relationships with our clients.”
The “catering supplier’s” website — eventsandcateringequipment.co.za — contains images of tents, chairs and other goods lifted from the website of Boss Tents of Durban, the country’s number one tent manufacturer.
I discovered that by doing a reverse image search of the images on that website, and up popped the identical images on the Boss website.
The imposters even stole Boss Tents’ claims, but infused them with a good dash of poor sentence construction: “We are the leading manufacturer and supplier of Best Alpine Marquee Tent in South Africa, as a result we became one of the most leading distributor of Tents for Sale in cape town and other Africa continent. Alpine Marquee Tent are one of the best Tents for Sale suited for big function and events.”
Mahomed Suleman, the owner of Boss Tents — and several other companies in the catering industry — knows all about the fraudsters and the often massive sums of money they trick people into paying them.
“Many of the victims come to us after being caught,” he said. “Someone from Namibia paid them R250,000 for goods which didn’t exist.”
Suleman did manage to get Google to ban the pretenders' adverts, but clearly they are still managing to dupe people into believing they are a legitimate company.
The biggest red flag is the “impossible” prices the fraudsters advertise — less than a quarter of Boss’ prices in some cases. Well, of course they can because they have zero products and zero overheads: the ridiculous prices are pure bait.
“People need to wise up about ‘bargain’ prices,” Suleman said.
Another oddity, he said, is that the “company” claims to be based in Cape Town, though the demand for the catering and hospitality products is mainly in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal.
“It makes no sense at all.”
Too many people are taking these websites and adverts at face value; chasing the promise of a bargain without any awareness about the modus operandi of fraudsters.
Here’s how to make yourself more scam-proof — if the price is great, let your default reaction be to suspect a scam. And then go full-on forensic. Google reviews of the company, interrogate their address, do reverse image searches on the product images and try to engage via phone. If you can’t, please know that it’s unlikely to end well for you if you send your money their way.
