Scam Warning - Skrill Ltd and fake websites

br1anstorm

This a very brief warning to anyone who shops or makes financial transactions online.

- be very careful of anything involving Skrill Ltd or skrill.com. This is a company based in London and registered with the FCA. It is described as a firm which handles electronic money transfers.

The firm is evidently used to transfer money internationally and to "process" (ie collect payments) from card accounts for orders placed online. Nothing obviously wrong in that....Thus it seems, in theory to be broadly similar to PayPal, or WorldPay, or maybe others like Western Union.

But I and others have just been scammed by a counterfeit website which harvested card and address details, ostensibly for an online order for a car spare part worth less than £40. The fraudsters operating the website then transmitted those details to Skrill, who made the charges (multiple charges within a matter of minutes totalling over £2,000) against my card account. The card provider is now taking investigative and remedial action.

The card provider has also said that Skrill is heavily used by online gamblers and so is 'flagged'.

To complete the picture, the warning extends to the three websites we have identified (there may be more), all apparently based in Germany, all apparently secure (https) and all using cloned corporate details of genuine German companies. I am not inserting live hyperlinks for obvious reasons, but those three sites, all claiming to offer car and motorcycle spares, are

sdcparts.de
sunparts24.com
teilefarber.com

The first also appears on the McAfee Site Advisor warning list and the equivalent Norton programme as a "dodgy" site although all other antimalware programmes seem to report it as clean.

So take care.... the online world is full of nasties.

forgotmyname

Did you do a whois on the domain?

We supply car parts you cannot find anywhere. How if the parts cannot be found anywhere?

br1anstorm

Just to answer (belatedly) the comment from forgotmyname...

Yes I did a whois lookup and IP tracing. I shan't put the details up on here. But the information has all been submitted to ActionFraud, the FCA and other regulatory authorities.

I rather fear, however, that the actual scammers who were operating the fraudulent websites using the details of real companies in Germany have moved on a lot more quickly than the law-enforcement agencies were able to act. In terms of online scams, Action Fraud (and the police) seem to move with the speed of a striking snail....!

I have no idea whether the FCA has conducted any kind of review or investigation of Skrill.com who come under their regulatory control.