Does this Bognor company exist?

keyser666

melbell wrote: »

I reported a certain "THIS IS A RIP OFF" site and Nominet agreed with me and made the whois update immediate.

Maybe your "Im doin diz for da monkey saving expurt fourumz" delayed them

No did not reference MSE and made them aware it was a scam site

Twisted_Animator

Sarawern wrote: »

After googling about trade6 I am gutted to find this thread. I believe I have been scammed too! For an ipad of all things. I paid for it on my credit card using paypal so am now going to start the process of trying to get my money back.

Any suggestions or advice would be greatfully recieved.

S

At least paying by credit card, if for some reason Paypal don't refund you, the credit card company should. I paid by debit card via Paypal. Hopefully it will all be fine anyway... just a pain as now I have to wait in hope to get my money back before I can buy another monitor.

I will now make sure I fully check any site I haven't heard of. User reviews on Google shopping can obviously be faked etc and no matter how reasonable a website looks (it's not great but have seen much worse), it's still worth doing some research.

Fingers crossed we get sorted soon. Just hope they haven't caught too many others.

gb12345

Twisted_Animator wrote: »

no matter how reasonable a website looks (it's not great but have seen much worse), it's still worth doing some research.

It is definitely worth doing research on a site before buying through them. Here are a few things to look for -

• On the site itself is there a physical contact address or telephone number - if there is just a contact form then this should be a red flag.
• What payment options do they offer - if they mention Western Union or Moneygram then avoid them like the plague. These services are meant for making personal payments to people you know not for buying goods.
• Are they selling branded goods for prices that are a lot cheaper than legitimate websites are offering? If so then the goods are either cheap fakes or you will never receive the items you order.
• Check the WhoIs information for the site (use a site such as whois.com) to see when the site was registered. If the site is only a couple of months old then this should be seen as a red flag.
• Also on the WhoIs record - look at the registrants details. If they are using a privacy protection service to hide their details then they've obviously got something to hide.
• Similarly to the above, if it is a .co.uk site and they have opted out of displaying registrants details due to being a non-trading individual then they are lieing. They are selling stuff, so they are trading - this should be reported to Nominet who will remove the opt-out and display the registrants details (although these will likely be false).
• If they claim to be a UK limited company then go to the Companies House website and search for the company's name on there. If it doesn't exist or says the company is "dissolved" then it is a scam.

Whilst a site that passes the above tests can't be guaranteed to be legitimate, it should at least help you avoid the more obvious scammers.