Edinburgh Fringe Festival flats scam.

tim123456789

G_M wrote: »

Apologies. You're right, but your original statement to which I responded did not make clear that distinction .

It was not my original statement

hunters

I live in Fife and work in Edinburgh just picked up the paper at the station on the way to work.

http://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/what-s-on/edinburgh-festival/edinburgh-fringe-web-scam-warning-after-flats-con-1-3022747

kathydq2

Thank you. According to the article at least 50 people have been affected by this crime. If all of these make reports to the police then
surely they must take action.

googler

... In 9 days or so.

kathydq2

One.com is the server for the site. I contacted them with details of what had happened. I asked if they could give any information that could be passed to the police. This was their reply......

Thank you for your email. We cannot give out customer data without a valid court order. In order to investigate this case any further, we ask you to provide us with a valid court order from either the EU or USA.

Kind Regards
Abuse @ One.com

Thus, the bank where the fraudulent account was held, said they could not follow it up "Because of data protection."
The police said that reports would end up in a data base, in London. Only to be investigated if sufficient reports were made.

On-line fraud is a very serious problem. These crooks are literally "Laughing all the way to the bank." They know they can easily get away with it!

fart

kathydq2 wrote: »

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.

I'm in a 1 bed flat in the centre, have a spare sofa, a floor and a pull out bed if they don't mind roughing it. £600 for all of them?

kathydq2

Thank you for offering. We managed to get a cancellation and they arrive tomorrow.