A hole in New Zealand's TradeMe

Ever made a purchase on an online auction site, then felt that gutting dread when you check the seller's profiles the day after you have deposited money in their bank account to see that the auction site has stopped them from trading?

Well, it turns out that I (most probably) have traded with people pulling a scam to avoid paying customs duties and GST. Whether I receive the goods is now in the hands of the Gods and the lovely, lovely people at Customs. (Did I mention that the people at Customs are perhaps more wonderful than anything?)

Why?
If I had known, I wouldn't have traded with these people. So why did I trade with these people in the first place?

1. 100% positive feedback. All the purchases had said it was a fast trade and all items had arrived.
2. They were offering a good price (probably too good, in retrospect).
3. There were no [obvious] signs that they weren't trading from New Zealand.

Why I thought they were NZ-based
Pointers that they were from New Zealand:

• Address Verified: they had attested to TradeMe that they were operating as a New Zealand business, from a New Zealand location.
• E-mail address: Using an e-mail address ending in ".co.nz".
• Bank account: When I purchased the item, I was directed to deposit the money in a Bank of New Zealand account.

In retrospect, I could have saved myself this anguish. If I had done a couple of simple checks, I would have found out that they were not in fact operating from New Zealand.

Checking out the bad guys
Simply, the first e-mail from them after the auction would have alerted me to their location overseas.

1. In my e-mail client, I chose to view All Headers. That displays the originating IP of the e-mail address. Copy the IP address.
2. Go to a site that performs whois type functionality (I used http://www.dnsstuff.com/) and paste that IP address into the appropriate box. Click OK, Go, or whatever they want you to click and check out the information on the IP address.
   

Doing this informed me that the e-mail came from Hong Kong. Bugger. All TradeMe users should get into this habit to help decrease this type of scam going on. I know I'll be doing it from now on before paying out ANY money.

The next step
So where to from here? I can only wait. Hopefully it is purely a duties scam: then I'll be getting a snotty letter from Customs in a few days asking me to fork out for duties. I can cope with that. I will be arguing the toss: I traded with these people in good faith and assumed they were New Zealand-based, and shipping from New Zealand. I'm not the bad guy!

If it eventuates that this is a bit more than that, then I've lost my money. To quote Rick from The Young Ones.... this is a bottomer. I guess I won't be buying my flash toy phone, I'll probably have to deal with a cheap-arse Nokia 1100 or something.