Connections: Caveat Emptor
A thick wool outdoorsman’s sweater made by Barbour of England — a gift from a family member who visited Great Britain a lot around the year 2000 and 2001 — has been my husband’s favorite for years. So as his birthday approached a few weeks ago, I decided to buy him another in a different color. A simple task given the simplicity of Internet shopping, right?
I first checked out the online shops of likely men’s outfitters and department stores — Brooks Brothers, J. Press, L.L. Bean, Saks Fifth Avenue — but had no luck. Lots of Barbour sweaters were available, but they either had faux-leather elbow patches (not quite my husband’s thing) or decorative stripes (even less his thing).
Eventually, however, I found a legitimate-looking website heralded with what looked like an official seal, complete with olive branches and a British Union Jack shield at center. At bottom, the site read: “Copyright @ Barbour UK.” The price in pounds was reasonable, and there would be free shipping.
His birthday, however, came and went with no sign of the sweater. Imagining that shipping from overseas was at fault, I sent a polite email to what I thought was a legitimate company, asking whether the sweater was on its way and when I could expect it to arrive. Getting no response, I sent another, which was a little less friendly. I had, of course, charged the sweater on a credit card and was beginning to smell a rat. Sure enough, returning to the website, I found that I had not studied the fine print.
It turned out that my credit cardinformation had been sent to outletonlinestoremy@gmail and that it had a URL reading “Fairwaydenver.com.” Back at Google, it appeared that I had been had. Red flags about Fairwaydenver.com were everywhere. The first scam-alert page I came to warned: “It could be unsecure: malware, phishing, fraud, and spam reports.” At the bottom of that page was a list of information, including an owner’s name (Hdam Yindrik) and country (Slovenia). “This website setup involves countries known to be high risk high percentage of online fraud or tendency to send fake/replica items.”
But wait! Another website-report page came up calling Tu Xiaofen the owner and Fuzhou, People’s Republic of China, the place of origin.
Hm. Curious, I searched further, clicking on ScamAdviser.com. A long list of websites this site had investigated came up. . . . Further and further I went until I came across the following oddly worded advice:
“Do not use them, you are helping a scam to promote their site on search engine and damage other sites reputation. You might said they can spot out a scam, nope, that was a known scam that can be found somewhere on the web. If that was not, they will say ‘xx%’ likely a scam. Everyone can tell this story, not only them. Wake up, don’t believe this scam and help them fooling around.”
I really don’t know at this point if the original retailer is a scam website or if the scam-alert websites are the scam. But the good news is that as far as I know my credit card company either did not receive a charge for the sweater or knew better than to accept it. Still, it’s a hassle and I guess I will have to spend a few minutes this morning putting a block on the card.
Is there a moral to this story? Not really. My husband’s birthday is now a month past, but I have looked around and found a source for the genuine Barbour article in Michigan.