Credit card scam

Drout0

I recently made a purchase on my credit card on 9 September for a car on a website named "secret car deals or secret cars deals.com. I purchased an audi paying for it on my credit card. The car did not arrive as promised, when I realised that this was a scam I contacted Halifax credit card who asked for all the details of the purchase which I gave them then the money was taken off my card. A few weeks later the amount was put back on and the first payment for 28th Nov.

I got in touch with Halifax and they said there was nothing they could do as the payment was made to another company "Safe online payments " not realising this as I just filled in the online form on secret cars website and they could not recoup the money because of this.

I am so angry and disappointed with Halifax as I thought that paying by credit card was safe.

I have never used my credit card before only this time even though I've been with Halifax for over 10years.

I am now having to pay a £5000 bill which I cannot afford. 

Sent from my Galaxy

[Deleted User]

Credit cards have protection for various things - you should ask for a chargeback from the firm, if not then ask for a section 75 refund to be raised and see what they say. 

k3lvc

So what's the full story ? You've bought a car from a dodgy website and are surprised that they've got loopholes to avoid S75 claims

Credit card payments require you to have completed some due diligence and followed prcedures - it's not a catch-all

Secret-cars-deals.com still shows up in searches but won't load on either my laptop or phone so seems even my security stuff knows it's dodgy 

DullGreyGuy

Drout0 said:

I recently made a purchase on my credit card on 9 September for a car on a website named "secret car deals or secret cars deals.com. I purchased an audi paying for it on my credit card. The car did not arrive as promised, when I realised that this was a scam I contacted Halifax credit card who asked for all the details of the purchase which I gave them then the money was taken off my card. A few weeks later the amount was put back on and the first payment for 28th Nov.

I got in touch with Halifax and they said there was nothing they could do as the payment was made to another company "Safe online payments " not realising this as I just filled in the online form on secret cars website and they could not recoup the money because of this.

I am so angry and disappointed with Halifax as I thought that paying by credit card was safe.

I have never used my credit card before only this time even though I've been with Halifax for over 10years.

I am now having to pay a £5000 bill which I cannot afford. 

You bought a £5,000 car online but cannot even remember where you bought it from?

On the basis you got the money back straight away this has been processed as a chargeback, this is an attempt to clawback the money from the merchant's account but the merchant gets to respond to the matter. If you've paid a middleman then they can potentially legitimately defend the claim saying you paid them to pay the money on to whatever.com and they did that.

Your next option is to attempt a S75 claim, which is unique to credit cards. It is likely that the existence of the middleman will also result in the claim being rejected however you can complain about this and take it to the Ombudsman. Under the strict letter of the law a middleman does invalidate S75 however the ombudsman has in the past upheld complaints on 4 party transactions where either they believe the middleman is just acting like an acquiring service or where they believe the customer had no knowledge of the middleman's involvement. 

grumbler

Deleted_User said:

Credit cards have protection for various things - you should ask for a chargeback from the firm, if not then ask for a section 75 refund to be raised and see what they say. 

The OP is very confusing, but it seems that s75 claim was rejected because some other company was in the middle and took/processed the payment. For chargeback this is irrelevant AFAIK.

DullGreyGuy said:

Drout0 said:

I recently made a purchase on my credit card on 9 September for a car on a website named "secret car deals or secret cars deals.com. I purchased an audi paying for it on my credit card. The car did not arrive as promised, when I realised that this was a scam I contacted Halifax credit card who asked for all the details of the purchase which I gave them then the money was taken off my card. A few weeks later the amount was put back on and the first payment for 28th Nov.

I got in touch with Halifax and they said there was nothing they could do as the payment was made to another company "Safe online payments " not realising this as I just filled in the online form on secret cars website and they could not recoup the money because of this.

I am so angry and disappointed with Halifax as I thought that paying by credit card was safe.

I have never used my credit card before only this time even though I've been with Halifax for over 10years.

I am now having to pay a £5000 bill which I cannot afford. 

... If you've paid a middleman then they can potentially legitimately defend the claim saying you paid them to pay the money on to whatever.com and they did that.

Your next option is to attempt a S75 claim, which is unique to credit cards.

S75 doesn't work when a middleman is involved, but chargeback has to work AFAIK.

DullGreyGuy

grumbler said:

Deleted_User said:

Credit cards have protection for various things - you should ask for a chargeback from the firm, if not then ask for a section 75 refund to be raised and see what they say. 

The OP is very confusing, but it seems that s75 claim rejected because some other company was in the middle and took/processed the payment. For chargeback this is irrelevant AFAIK.

DullGreyGuy said:

Drout0 said:

I recently made a purchase on my credit card on 9 September for a car on a website named "secret car deals or secret cars deals.com. I purchased an audi paying for it on my credit card. The car did not arrive as promised, when I realised that this was a scam I contacted Halifax credit card who asked for all the details of the purchase which I gave them then the money was taken off my card. A few weeks later the amount was put back on and the first payment for 28th Nov.

I got in touch with Halifax and they said there was nothing they could do as the payment was made to another company "Safe online payments " not realising this as I just filled in the online form on secret cars website and they could not recoup the money because of this.

I am so angry and disappointed with Halifax as I thought that paying by credit card was safe.

I have never used my credit card before only this time even though I've been with Halifax for over 10years.

I am now having to pay a £5000 bill which I cannot afford. 

... If you've paid a middleman then they can potentially legitimately defend the claim saying you paid them to pay the money on to whatever.com and they did that.

Your next option is to attempt a S75 claim, which is unique to credit cards.

S75 doesn't work when a middleman is involved, but chargeback has to work AFAIK.

Its similar to paypal, the chargeback goes against the middleman for not supplying the goods/service which the middleman defends saying they did provide the service as they passed the money on hence the chargeback fails. 

Unfortunately the ombudsman website is having issues this morning but the D-C-S relationship almost never exists without other parties when it comes to credit cards because you have the supplier's acquiring bank in the mix as a minimum extra party. Its long been tradition to ignore the traditional banking service providers but the more modern ones (worldpay, zettle, sum up etc) have caused questions to be raised (https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2017/04/revealed-section-75-credit-card-protection-may-fail-due-to-payment-processing-loophole---shoppers-beware/). Once the ombudsman website is back up an running properly you can find many cases quoting a previous court case on the matter which said S75 stands even with some 4th parties.

Rarer, but still there are cases, is where the customer is totally unaware of an extra party being involved and the ombudsman has taken its role on finding fair outcomes as a higher precedent... again you will find many decisions where they state they arent bound to follow the letter of the law. One case that I've not been able to re-find even when the site was working was when the merchant had borrowed the neighbouring business' card machine; the ombudsman found the customer had no way of knowing and so it'd have been unfair to them not to uphold the complaint. 

Asghar

Drout0 said:

I am so angry and disappointed with Halifax as I thought that paying by credit card was safe.

I have never used my credit card before only this time even though I've been with Halifax for over 10years.

I am now having to pay a £5000 bill which I cannot afford. 

Halifax must be angry with your stupidity, expecting them to give you free £5000 to spend on a dodgy website.

TadleyBaggie

The real "Secret Car Deals" is a trading name for Hodson Ford of Stafford, which seems to be a legit company. However there seems to have been an imposter website (now defunct) that was using the same name. Their Facebook page has a warning about the fake:

https://m.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063929023084

From cached information on the fake site, they were clearly advertising top end cars at rock bottom prices, e.g. a 2015 AMG C-Class for under £7K. All the hallmark of a scam car trader.

[Deleted User]

grumbler said:

Deleted_User said:

Credit cards have protection for various things - you should ask for a chargeback from the firm, if not then ask for a section 75 refund to be raised and see what they say. 

The OP is very confusing, but it seems that s75 claim was rejected because some other company was in the middle and took/processed the payment. For chargeback this is irrelevant AFAIK.

DullGreyGuy said:

Drout0 said:

I recently made a purchase on my credit card on 9 September for a car on a website named "secret car deals or secret cars deals.com. I purchased an audi paying for it on my credit card. The car did not arrive as promised, when I realised that this was a scam I contacted Halifax credit card who asked for all the details of the purchase which I gave them then the money was taken off my card. A few weeks later the amount was put back on and the first payment for 28th Nov.

I got in touch with Halifax and they said there was nothing they could do as the payment was made to another company "Safe online payments " not realising this as I just filled in the online form on secret cars website and they could not recoup the money because of this.

I am so angry and disappointed with Halifax as I thought that paying by credit card was safe.

I have never used my credit card before only this time even though I've been with Halifax for over 10years.

I am now having to pay a £5000 bill which I cannot afford. 

... If you've paid a middleman then they can potentially legitimately defend the claim saying you paid them to pay the money on to whatever.com and they did that.

Your next option is to attempt a S75 claim, which is unique to credit cards.

S75 doesn't work when a middleman is involved, but chargeback has to work AFAIK.

It wasn't really clear on that what they tried to do. I did a refund request with Halifax with a legit t-shirt website, had been established years, proper UK address etc and they did the usual order accepted, processing emails etc then nothing. I did a request on the Halifax site and I assume they just did a chargeback as I got the money back and it wasn't disputed. That is why I put both bits in as it's not clear if Halifax have looked at it as an S75 or just assumed there was a middleman, but safe online payments could simply be a payment processor, albeit part of the same dodgy company.

cymruchris

Having looked at the cached version of the website - it appears they were listing a number of cars at way, way, way under retail price. 

Here's a screen shot of part of their last inventory:



A 2016 Merc A Class 1.6 AMG Auto should be going for around £15k - even an insurance write-off is going for £9k - and here they advertise at £6k? (And all other listings/prices are along a similar vein). 

What was the exact model/year you bought? and how much are similar models being listed on Autotrader?

They say they were in business for over 7 years, but the website was registered in July (and is now off-line).

The address shows as a rural road in the middle of nowhere, and there's no contact phone number.

So all-in-all - red flags everywhere. I'm not sure where you go with this one - but others can advise better than me in what you can and can't try and claim for. 

penners324

Why haven't you told Halifax that this was fraud? Report it to Action Fraud as well.

Far more likely to get the money back