Online scam for 'free' electronic gifts wound up

The company behind a website offering free electronic gifts to buyers of compact discs has been wound up following a DTI investigation.
Liquorice Mix Ltd sold compact discs via its website for between £20 and £750, something that should have raised eyebrows in itself. Each CD was offered with an electronic product such as a laptop or an iPod. Buyers were then told they needed to wait to receive their electronic 'gift'.

The curious thing is that DTI investigators never found out exactly what was on the CDs. Visitors to the website simply handed over their money, presumably not in the expectation of receiving Westlife's latest album, but in order to receive the 'free gift'.

This scam is known as a 'straight line matrix'. When the queue for a particular product had reached a certain length, varying between 10 and 150, the lucky person at the front of the queue was sent the gift. However. The length of the queue was far more than the number of gifts dispatched.

'This is plainly a money circulation scheme,' said registrar Mr Rawson in winding up Liquorice Mix Ltd adding that 'The scheme is essentially fraudulent'.