Gumtree fraud

KS2012

Hi. Just wondering if anyone has any advice on what to do after being conned out of money on the internet. We thought we had bought tickets from a seller on Gumtree and unfortunately gave £500 for them. We tried to contact the seller for over a week and then found out she was still trying to sell the tickets we thought we had already bought. Have contacted Gumtree and the police but all they could do was give us the Action Fraud helpline number, which we have contacted but there's not much they can do. We have bank details and other information but they wont look at individual investigations, unless they suspect the person has committed multiple frauds. We paid by bank transfer using a credit card and thought we might be protected but the credit card company have told us that we aren't as we were dealing with a person as opposed to a company. Does anyone know if this is right? We read that credit card companies accept equal liability in some fraud cases but trying to find any evidence of that in cases like this is proving to be very difficult. Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks

DUTR

If all sources have told you there is not much you can do then it seems that is the way it is, I know you are a newbie and this is a friendly forum n all that, but didn't you feel at the time parting with money like that to a stranger unprotected was somewhat naive and not to be recomended?

Alias_Omega

You have bank account & name of said person. This person is probably a mule, and passing the funds on.

I would google the sort code, which will bring up a location. Most people live in the same area as the sort code, so start running the surname/name through 192.com with the area.

You might have to pay 192.com for the address, but you will hopefully eventually get an address.

From here, i would serve a small claims court claim against them for the £500 + costs.

You might never ever get your cash back, but you would have peace of mind.

petersoftware

Credit card company would be equally liable for the fraud if they were used as the payment method however from your description it would appear you used the credit card to fund a bank transfer. Therefore the credit card transaction was not fraudulent and you did get what you paid for with the credit card - a bank transfer was the product or service. The second transaction, which was the bank transfer to the "ticket owners" was where the fraud may have happened. It can be very difficult to get a bank transfer reversed but I would suggest contacting the banks involved in this rather than the credit card company.