蜜芽传媒

蜜芽传媒 Radio 4 listener Elfie Waren from Berwick-upon-Tweed bought what she believed was a knitted cardigan online, after seeing an advertisement on social media.

The website, called Milena-London.com, was offering what it said was a 50% sale.

“It looked like it had been hand-knitted. That was the general impression that I got from the photographs,” says Elfie.

“It was kind of fluffy… It looked for all the world like a knitted garment. It said that it was crafted from a premium soft-knit fabric.”

“I went out of Facebook and had a look at the website itself. It’s a very nice website, its beautifully laid out, it’s got lots of other lovely clothes in it, and I went to the cardigan and looked at the promotion there, and decided that I would like to order two.”

But what Elfie received in the post was very different to what she was expecting.

“It was actually a picture of knitting printed on a polyester fabric... and it wasn't even a very good printed picture,” she states.

“I was gobsmacked. Couldn’t quite believe it. I tried one of the cardigans on and thought, that looks horrible – no one is ever going to believe that looks like a knitted garment.”

Elfie took the hit and paid £30 to post the goods back to China, where her package sat in customs for around four months.

Then, to add insult to injury, the "cardigans" were sent back to her house in Scotland.

This is a scam of “expectation versus reality,” explains 蜜芽传媒 fraud investigator Shari Vahl, who heads up the Scam Secrets team.

What is on the screen in front of you and what you receive are never the same.

“I call these smash and grab frauds because the website’s only up for maximum three months, they get loads and loads of bad reviews, they grab as much money as they possibly can and then they vanish.”

“These websites can be spun up very quickly,” explains Chris Ainsley, Head of Fraud Risk Management at Santander.

“They’re advertised through social media and their main aim is to essentially get money out of you from a card transaction, send you something in the post that you may or may not complain about to them and then may or may not complain about to your bank.”

Your money is taken instantly, but the goods might be shipping from the other side of the world.

“That means that you've got a few months potentially before you realise what's gone wrong or till something turns up,” says Chris.

The goods you receive might be laughable, but there is a much darker side to this type of fraud.

“The whole sale of the cardigan or sale of any of these goods is literally, as we say, the sprat to catch the mackerel,” suggests former scammer Alex Wood.

“There's a much bigger game at play here.”

Alex, who is now part of the Scam Secrets team, turned his back on a life of crime when he heard the impact statement from one of his victims in court, and realised the severity of his actions.

He says he felt "monumental shame" about his crimes, and now works with banks and the police to protect the public from criminals like he used to be.

Read more about Alex's story here.

It is your personal details that the fraudsters are after, Alex explains: your phone number, home address, email address and, critically, your card or bank details.

If you have received something that you didn't expect in the post, be it a counterfeit good, something not fit for purpose – or equally if the goods never arrived – there are two things that you should do immediately, says Chris.

Firstly, contact your bank.

“The bank may ask you if you've already tried to return the item so it's probably best that you go through some of those processes with the merchant first and then contact your bank if you don't get any luck.”

“If you're having no joy, and you paid by card with the merchants, you have the option to go through the card scheme to do a dispute.”

Secondly, if you have given away your card details, even if you didn't go through with the purchase, ask your bank for your card to be reissued.

“There are criminals running those websites and if they’ve got your card number, they will potentially use them for other things.”

You might start to see unauthorised transactions in your account, he warns.

This is organised crime on a giant scale.

These scams are set up time after time with the same format of website, very similar pricing and an identical marketing approach, Chris explains.

“It clearly is some kind of organised financial crime gang that's operating out of another part of the world.”

“Almost every single one of the countries that we operate in across Europe, Latin America, North America and certainly some further afield are all seeing exactly this type of scam,” he says.

And it’s not just us, as individuals, that are being targeted.

“They’re not necessarily solely trying to steal the money from the person who’s sitting there waiting for their knitted cardigan,” explains the fraud expert.

“What these criminals are doing is trying to steal money from the bank that’s acquiring that card transaction on the other side of the world.”

The websites might look legitimate, but often there will be red flags, as the Scam Secrets team and guest expert Chris Ainsley explain.

Here are five checks you can make when shopping online:

1. Check for fake Trustpilot reviews: “It might be that the reviews all look very similar or they only have a first name… or they have similar profile pictures,” says Lis. “A lack of any bad reviews at all can also be a warning sign."
   
   
2. Check the website copy - are there any spelling errors? Alex went to the About Us page on one website: “It's quite clear to me that the English on this page has been translated from Mandarin.”
   
   
3. Check how long a website has existed – an indication of whether a company is who they say they are.
   
   
4. Check the company name: “You can also type the name of the company into any search engine and write plus scam or plus fraud,” advises Lis. This might bring up whether anyone has been defrauded using the site.
   
   
5. Check the returns policy: Once you’ve made a dodgy purchase, if arranging a return is complicated, difficult and the company are trying to haggle with you, or won’t give you your money back, that’s another red flag.
   
   “It’s at this point that it’s time to contact your bank and instruct a chargeback or to report it as a fraud,” says Chris.

According to Chris Ainsley, the main way consumers are coming into contact with these scams is via social media adverts.

“In almost all situations that I've seen, these are not websites that are just floating around waiting for someone to hit them,” says Chris.

“The marketing is done and the charging for that marketing is all coming through social media.”

Chris argues that better vetting of adverts by social media organisations is needed, as is the imposing of relevant legislation.

“I don't particularly feel that seeing an advert and therefore buying something off the back of it should be entirely down to the consumer to manage," he says.

Lis, a forensic linguist, agrees: “I think that consumers need to be much better protected because there's so much going on here that's incredibly powerful in terms of behavioural science.”

The language and the images, she says, are “carefully crafted to deceive you.”

Scam Secrets: The Great Knitted Cardigan Scam is available now on 蜜芽传媒 Sounds. Subscribe now so you never miss an episode.