Edinburgh Fringe Festival flats scam.

kathydq2

My son and his friends are appearing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. They are acting in a play about Charles Dickens, called "Grated Expectations". Accommodation was booked with fringeflats.co.uk, at the beginning of June. Last thursday, 18th July, we discovered the site had been deleted and all emails bounced. It appears we have been cheated out of £1420.00. If anybody else has been affected by this, please report the crime to the Action Fraud Site. The Police have said that they can only investigate this type of crime if sufficient reports are received.

MumOf2

That's shocking - how horrible to take advantage of young people like this. Do hope you have some luck getting at least some of the money back.

MumOf2
x

Guest101

If paid by credit card, even if it was £1 on credit card, you should be covered for the whole amount.

The police are duty bound to investigate this, the resources they put on it arent going to be the flying squad, but you have a crime reference number, speak to your local police commissioner, this type of crime must be investigated.

googler

I'm not going to print details here in case there's a reasonable explanation, but the website owner's details are on public record, for all to see, via a Whois search at nominee UK.

According to the domain registrar, it can't be selected, so it seems they think it's still active.

lvm

That's awful!

Looks like the domain is available to purchase now.

If I can do anything to help, I'd be more than happy to (I'm in Edinburgh and manage holidays flats in the city centre - albeit we are fully booked but could help check out the flat that was booked or give you good websites to look at).

G_M

Guest101 wrote: »

If paid by credit card, even if it was £1 on credit card, you should be covered for the whole amount.

If you are referring to S75 protection (Consumer Credit Act 1974) this applies to payments over £100.

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/shopping/section75-protect-your-purchases

tim123456789

G_M wrote: »

If you are referring to S75 protection (Consumer Credit Act 1974) this applies to payments over £100.

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/shopping/section75-protect-your-purchases

No it doesn't

It applies to purchases over 100 pounds (and IIRC less that 30,000)

googler

lvm wrote: »

That's awful!

Looks like the domain is available to purchase now.

Not from its current registrar, it isn't.

hunters

I'd get in touch with Edinburgh Evening News and give them the story.

and the Fringe people

https://www.edfringe.com/

kathydq2

Edinburgh Fringe Festival flats scam.

Thank you for all your replies. I also posted this in the "Rants" board. It's my first time posting so I got a bit confused. These are the replies I made on there. Sorry, I only mentioned the play because I thought this would show that this was a credible post. I could go into a lot of detail, but short version is that a young person (unemployed) has lost £400. More so, with only 2 weeks to go to the start of the festival, the chances of finding anything affordable were almost non-existent. A last minute cancellation has come up and they will now be able to go.

Indeed the total cost for the group was £1420.00. My son's cost was £400. We have made extensive investigations into this, but it is a long story. A member of the family who works in I.T. was able to discover that the site had been activated 31st May 2013. When it was taken down, it quite obviously had had everything deleted. We have the name of the person who registered the domain and this is also the person who we contacted when making the bookings. His address is a vacant flat which is for sale. We have his bank details for the payment, but the bank involved will not take any action even though we have informed them of the fraudulent account. The actual accommodation is student flats. We contacted the address, of the flats, only to be told that the all the flats were owned by the university and managed by them only. TripAdvisor has posts from 2011 where a very similar scam happened. The details are very similar and the price for the accommodation (student flats) is identical My main intention by posting this was simply to alert others who will also have been scammed. and not know how to proceed. Thank you.

G_M

If paid by credit card, even if it was £1 on credit card, you should be covered for the whole amount.

If you are referring to S75 protection (Consumer Credit Act 1974) this applies to payments over £100.

tim123456789 wrote: »

No it doesn't

It applies to purchases over 100 pounds (and IIRC less that 30,000)

Apologies. You're right, but your original statement to which I responded did not make clear that distinction (between the amount of the purchase, and the amount charged to the card).

At a quick reading, I misunderstood, as might have oher forumites.

However I accept that in the context of the OP's accomodation costs, it was over £100.