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.

robatwork

Try this:
http://www.nominet.org.uk/whois/lookup?query=fringeflats.co.uk

Of course it is possible you came on here to puff your son's play as that is really irrelevant to your vent, but hey, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

kathydq2

Thank you for the link. I will try this straight away. 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.

googler

So you don't accept that there may be a legitimate explanation? The website is down because of a hiccup with the hosting company, maybe? The proprieter has been taken ill, been in a car accident, or worse, and is unable to respond?

In the other thread, you said £1420, but here it's £400. Which is it?

Azari

googler wrote: »

So you don't accept that there may be a legitimate explanation? The website is down because of a hiccup with the hosting company, maybe? The proprieter has been taken ill, been in a car accident, or worse, and is unable to respond?

Sites do not stop working just because someone has become incapacitated in some way.

If emails are being bounced that means that the email account has been closed which is not something that happens overnight.

There may well be an innocent explanation but it is far more likely to be fraud.

In the other thread, you said £1420, but here it's £400. Which is it?

She said 'my son and his friends'.

Presumably, his share of the £1420 was £400.

Simple, really.

kathydq2

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.

ThumbRemote

googler wrote: »

So you don't accept that there may be a legitimate explanation? The website is down because of a hiccup with the hosting company, maybe? The proprieter has been taken ill, been in a car accident, or worse, and is unable to respond?

In the other thread, you said £1420, but here it's £400. Which is it?

Are you the worlds most gullible consumer?

jennikitten

robatwork wrote: »

Try this:
http://www.nominet.org.uk/whois/lookup?query=fringeflats.co.uk

Email One.com's abuse team as well.

ihateyes

surely you can calim this as fraud with the bank.....

shaun_from_Africa

ihateyes wrote: »

surely you can calim this as fraud with the bank.....

No.
There was no fraud involved in making the money transfer and that is the only part of the deal that the bank were involved in.
They don't have any responsibility over what happens to the money once it has been received by the correct person.

dodger1

Was there no way of paying by card? That should have got the alarm bells ringing.