I was recently scammed attempting to purchase an R4 SDHC card from a website. The website does not have correct contact information listed, and didn’t even send a confirmation that my payment had been received. Some of you might have seen my last thread on paypal disputes regarding this attempted purchase. Seeing as the amount I lost was around $15 I was tempted to write it off as a poor decision and forget about it. I then got to thinking about how many other people could have been scammed by this website and decided I would rather report them.
I did a fair bit of searching and the only resource I could come up with was http://www.ic3.gov/default.aspx. I started filling out their forum and it asked for some information which puzzled me such as “Name of your local police or sheriff’s office” or “Please indicate the initial means of contact with the individual/business that victimized you”. It seems like the site I linked is intended for cases of a larger scope.
Is there an easy way to report an obvious scam such as this one? Or a method of reporting purely online fraudulent transactions, with little information on the seller? In other words is there any way I can ensure this website will be taken down, or at least looked in to for its fraud?
I think the website you found is your best bet. The reason they would want to know your local police department’s info is that prosecuting online crimes is a complicated thing, since the person that defrauded you is likely in a completely different jurisdiction, so it may take the cooperation of multiple law enforcement agencies to do anything. Because there are no “internet police” the only thing you can do is report it to your local PD or the FBI, which it seems is the purpose of the site you already found.
I’m not going to click anywhere past the landing page, but it seems to be a site that promotes identity theft. Not sure how a site like that can be allowed to continue existing.