Predators lurking in the online small ads: From conmen to sex attackers

With a series of photos of the car’s glossy black exterior and leather interior, full service history and a specification list promising all manner of gadgetry, the online advertisement was enticing.

It was, boasted the seller, a ‘stunning’ example of a 2006 Audi A6 — on sale for the bargain price of £4,590.

At his home in Prestatyn, North Wales, Kevin Thomas was thrilled that on his very first foray onto the online marketplace Gumtree, he’d found just the car he was looking for.

‘I’d always wanted an Audi, a good, reliable, safe car, for when my wife Sarah and I started a family,’ says Kevin. ‘A friend of mine had just bought one on the internet, so I decided to have a look, too.’

Today, if the 32-year-old steel erector sounds bitter, it is with good reason. 

For the advert turned out to be nothing more than an elaborate fraud. It has left Kevin and Sarah, who are expecting their first child in March, thousands of pounds out of pocket — and with no car to show for it.

‘It took me a long while to get that money together, and to lose it felt like I’d been stabbed in the stomach,’ says Kevin.

If there is any solace for Kevin, who until the summer knew little of the extent of the dangers lurking on sites like Gumtree, it is that he is not alone. 

For as the Mail revealed last week, police receive 250 crime and fraud allegations a week connected to the online ‘small ads’ service.

According to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau, 997 reports of fraud and cyber-crime in October had a link to Gumtree — equivalent to some 32 a day — while eBay was cited as a link in 1,483 fraud cases, or almost 50 a day.

But there is one crucial difference between the two sites. Customers on eBay are guaranteed to get their goods or money back when there is a fraud. There is no such protection for Gumtree users.

Founded in 2000, Gumtree was originally designed to help Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans based in the UK to find jobs and homes. It proved such a success that in 2005 it was sold to eBay for an undisclosed — though presumably sizeable — figure.

Today, Gumtree attracts 9 million visitors each month and more than 150 million adverts have been posted. The adverts are many and varied. Shortly before Christmas, for instance, it emerged that a 20-year-old woman from Bradford had offered to sell her infant son on Gumtree for £150,000.

Police and social services were alerted after scores of people saw the ad. Officers traced the woman and took the child and his two-year-old brother into care.

The ‘sale’ of a baby is, it seems, the rather extreme tip of a criminal iceberg. 

A Mail investigation this week uncovered evidence of scams involving adverts for everything from flats to rent to cars, insurance policies and concert tickets.

According to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau, 997 reports of fraud and cyber-crime in October had a link to Gumtree - equivalent to some 32 a day - while eBay was cited as a link in 1,483 fraud cases, or almost 50 a day

Kevin Thomas’s experience unfolded in June 2013 when he spotted the Audi advertised for sale. He called the phone number listed, but got a text message reply telling him it was a work phone number and the seller could not use it for personal calls, so could they correspond by email.

‘I got an email from someone called Carla, in Scotland, and she told me she now had a company car and no longer needed the Audi,’ recalls Kevin. 

‘I replied saying I was very interested. I’d done a check of the car’s history using an online service that requires only the registration number, and it all came back fine, so I was extremely happy.’

Agreement reached, the seller told Kevin she would send him a website link that would enable him to complete the transaction on eBay. Knowing that eBay provided a more secure service than Gumtree, Kevin was happy to proceed.

‘I clicked on the attachment and everything looked legitimate,’ says Kevin. 

He duly made a bank transfer of the total sum, on the understanding that eBay would hold the money until he had received the vehicle, which the seller had said she would have delivered to him via a work contact.

 

So far, so convincing. Except Kevin now knows the eBay link he’d been sent was nothing more than a very clever fake.

On the Saturday, when the car didn’t arrive as planned, Kevin began to panic. ‘It was supposed to arrive at 2pm, but that came and went and I put it down to traffic,’ says Kevin. ‘I emailed and sent text messages but I heard nothing. 

‘Then, at about 5pm, my brother-in-law arrived. He typed the “work” mobile phone number into Google and up it came on a website warning people about scams. That’s when my heart sank.’

Despite making contact with Gumtree, eBay, local police and Action Fraud — the national body that collates details of this kind of crime — Kevin was unable to get his money back.

‘I went online looking at these scam forums and found loads of other people had been scammed in the same way,’ he says.

To make matters worse, Kevin says he found the car readvertised on two further occasions. Each time he reported his concerns to Gumtree — making three reports in total.

From his research online and conversations with other victims, Kevin believes a string of people have ‘purchased’ the same car.

Founded in 2000, Gumtree was originally designed to help Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans based in the UK to find jobs and homes. It proved such a success that in 2005 it was sold to eBay for an undisclosed - though presumably sizeable - figure

He has contacted Action Fraud but has not been told what, if any, investigation is being carried out.
‘To lose that money is absolutely gutting,’ he says. ‘There really needs to be better security  and registration for Gumtree, because people are being  ruthlessly exploited.’

Mature student Jasmine Begum, 36, feels equally stung by her experience of Gumtree. In December 2012, she was one of dozens of people left thousands of pounds out of pocket by a fraudulent landlord who went by the name of Pervez Roy. 

Roy convinced flat-hunters to hand over a total of almost £30,000 in deposits and advance rent for a flat he did not own.

‘I was homeless and staying with friends in Essex when I saw the ad on Gumtree,’ says Jasmine. ‘It was £1,000 a month, including council tax, and seemed to be just what I was looking for.

After leaving a message on the seller’s voicemail, several days later Jasmine received a call inviting her to view the flat in Islington, North London. Quite how the fake seller gained access to the property she does not know.

She agreed to pay £2,500 in cash up front — six weeks’ rent as a deposit and a month’s rent in advance. ‘I borrowed £500 from a friend and the rest was the sum total of my savings,’ says Jasmine.

In retrospect, she wishes she had listened to a nagging instinct that something wasn’t right, but she was desperate for somewhere to live. 

Having handed over the cash, Jasmine was given a contract and on December 1 arrived at the flat ahead of moving her bags in. 

‘When I arrived, there was a big bike chain across the door and a note in the window saying, “If you paid a deposit for this flat it’s a scam — go to the police station”.’

When she did just that, Jasmine discovered a sobbing Polish girl already at the station, reporting the same scam. Others arrived later. Unsurprisingly no one could reach Mr Roy.

‘I feel so stupid,’ says Jasmine, ‘but I had no idea such a thing could happen. I complained to Gumtree but no one came back to me.’
Ticket sales are another area ripe for exploitation by scammers, who promise goods for sale, take payment by bank transfer and fail to deliver.

There are even scams operating within the online jobs market. In November, a gang was jailed for stealing hundreds of thousands of pounds from job-hunters by placing fake adverts for companies including Harrods and Argos.

They targeted people looking for work on sites such as Gumtree. Anyone responding to the advertisement was sent a link via email asking them to complete an online application form.

It also, however, downloaded malicious software known as ‘malware’ to the user’s computer, which recorded keystrokes to capture private financial data and transmit it back to the gang.

Besides the dangers of malware, Gumtree itself points out that ‘some work from home opportunities are fronts for money laundering’.

Shocking: Saturday's Daily Mail revealed a woman had tried to sell her son on Gumtree for £150,000

‘

A key warning sign,’ says Gumtree ‘should be any “job” that involves you receiving cheques and cashing them. These jobs are sometimes referred to as “money mules”.’

Meanwhile, in October, police smashed a ring of suspected fraudsters behind a multi-million-pound “ghost broker” car insurance scam, using sites, including Gumtree, to sell fake policies. 

It seems the dangers of Gumtree are physical, too.

In 2012, a young medical student from Birmingham posted an advert on Gumtree offering babysitting services. Two days later, she received an email from a stranger purporting to be a gynaecological researcher working for a global medical company.

She responded, asking what would be required and later received a ‘very convincing’ phone call from a man called Liam Ryan, who said he would pay her £5,000 to assist his research into menstrual pain.

They arranged to meet at an office address in Birmingham — but when she arrived a horrific reality dawned. She was alone with a stranger in what was a mini-cab office. Ryan locked the door and sexually assaulted her.

Birmingham Crown Court heard how Ryan also received more than 200 replies to an advert he’d placed offering women cash for medical research. 

This led to three other women being duped into intimate ‘examinations’. He was jailed for four-and-a-half years.

City worker Chris Mills, 33, also had a terrifying experience after deciding to sell a £7,000 Hublot Big Bang watch on Gumtree. He got a phone call from a young woman who wanted to buy the watch as a present for her father but asked to view it first. ‘I didn’t feel threatened at all,’ he says.

Lauren Lafayette-Ede arrived at his home in North-West London. What unfolded was chilling.
‘I let her in. Unbeknown to me, she left the door ajar, allowing two men in balaclavas to follow her in. Suddenly, I heard them running down the stairs behind me and they flashed a gun at me. 

‘It was terrifying. My sister was upstairs. When something like that happens, you don’t know what will happen next.’

The robbers told Chris, who had already handed over the watch, to give them his mobile. As he was going upstairs to get it, he bellowed his sister’s name, which startled the robbers and they fled.

The trio, who carried out a series of similar attacks, were caught and convicted of conspiracy to rob.
Citizens Advice has called on Gumtree to require all users to set up accounts with verifiable names and addresses to combat crime. 

‘Online marketplaces need to take more responsibility for what goes on in their name by being more transparent and strengthening protections for consumers,’ says a spokesman.

Gumtree says it removes dubious adverts and liaises with the police whenever concerns are raised.
A spokesman said: ‘The safety of our users is a top priority for us. 

‘We follow the same model as offline classifieds. We facilitate the meeting but not the payment. We do, however, take the safety of our users very seriously and support them through our comprehensive safety advice.’

This advice can be found on the website. It warns consumers to be cautious about payment methods and not to use money transfer services such as Western Union, Moneygram and UKash, which it says are not meant for transactions between strangers and have been favoured by fraudsters.
It also advises: ‘If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.’ 

Sound advice. But it doesn’t  help people like Kevin, Jasmine  or Chris.

SOURCE-DAILYM