FraudTracking.com

There are a number of websites where you can find out about your rights as a consumer within the United Kingdom. The primary source is Consumer Direct.

It has a number of helpful links depending on the type of purchase involved:

Your consumer rights when buying goods and services

• Consumer rights - an introduction
• Buying a service - your consumer rights
• Returning faulty items
• More on your consumer rights when buying goods and services

Buying a car - your consumer rights

• Buying a car - your rights
• Buying a second-hand car - checks you should make
• Repairing and servicing your car

Please note that purchased on your doorstep, over the Internet, have different rights compared to sales from a retail shop or other direct establishment:

Situations that can change your consumer rights

• Buying on your doorstep - your consumer rights
• Internet, mail order and telephone shopping
• Guarantees and warranties for goods - your consumer rights
• More on situations that can change your consumer rights

While you can find out a lot of useful information from the website, it is well worth phoning them. There are a large number of grey areas and they will help you with your specific claim very quickly.

For instance if you buy a car and it fails, in any way, within your warranty period, the onus is on the seller to investigate and repair. They are legally obliged to pay for the repairs unless they prove that the fault is from reasonable wear-and-tear which would require a report from a qualified engineer. Then you may be required to pay part or all of the repair cost. The test for liability based on wear and tear also involves “what any reasonable layperson would expect”. If a car dealer refuses to repair, or even investigate, a fault during the warranty period, they are in breach of contract (specifically your Warranty contract). This will entitle you to claim specific damages should the situation ever go to Court.

In plain English the legal term Specific Damages simply means compensation to you for any additional costs you incurred which you would not have incurred if the contract was honoured. A common explanation you may see is “put the claimant back in the position they would have been in had the breach of contract not taken place“.

If you did not receive details of your warranty (all car dealers should supply these), there are two possibilities.

• A verbal warranty is as binding as a written one. Have a witness if possible.
• You are always covered by your consumer rights regardless of the presence, or absence, of a warranty.

Tax avoidance is the minimisation of tax liability by lawful methods.

Tax evasion is the illegal non-payment or underpayment of tax.

You are entitled to use any legal method to reduce your tax liability. This may include a wide range of deductions for costs related to the generation of income. Note: Fewer deductions exist for full-time employed persons as opposed to self-employed persons (sole traders, partnerships, Limited companies etc).

In the case of cash sales (goods, cars, bootsales etc) whether tax is payable depends on the following:

• Was the item purchased for the purpose of reselling?
• Has the item been owned for a substantial period of time (many years)?

Argh

A database problem on our hosting for this blog resulted in our WordPress database having to be replaced, effectively losing all our previous posts. As it was a non-standard database for a place-holder website we did not have a backup.

If we manage to restore the historical posts we will. I typed the first one back in manually as we had a screen shot.

Thanks

Hi everyone,

I know we have been conspicuous by our absense, but we had to abandon our old hosting company.

Aside from the numerous techical issues, they kept overcharging for domains no longer registered with them (sometimes a year later!).

Anyway, we have a new hosting company that we really like with great features and even cheaper than our previous one. We should not have to worry about bandwidth limits any more.

This blog is a placeholder until the site is restored. Keep an eye out for it! We will copy some older posts of greater interest forward as we recover them from the old database.

Thanks, Dave

The highlight of 2009 was the successful launch of our automated systems for detecting and reporting mass eBay fraud.

During the 3 month trial we detected over 1 million fraudulent auctions with an item face value of over £50 million GBP. This figure is actually an underestimate as only the face value of a single item was used in the calculation whereas multiple-item listings were also quite common.

After the automated reporting of approximately 27,000 user accounts, the head of eBay USA’s fraud department phone me directly to find out how we were doing it. This was followed a few days later by a personal call from the head of eBay UKs fraud department.

As a direct result of our investigations, and quite possibly the fear of it being published, eBay quickly changed many of it policies to do with fraud. The fraud departments were assigned more staff (we are guessing a lot more staff).

Unfortunately not all changes implemented were positive for buyer as they made it more difficult for outsiders/do-gooders to contact other members to warn them of potential losses. They did however stop the Chinese feedback circles quite promptly.

Not so quiet on the Western Front.

We do not normally get many cases from USA buyers, but a new one has cropped up of interest. Due to the change in methods we see more often nowadays, we are especially interested in cases were buyers are using the eBay/PayPal system itself to perpertrate fraud against user of those sites.

Once we get our database/site back up and running you will be able to see our stats on the incidence of fraud from various countries.

A USA buyer, whose 112 eBay feedback rating would indicate a reputable eBayer, has reversed a $300+ transaction, apparently using his Bank to reverse the payment. This is not too unusual in itself, although an eBay/PayPal dispute would be the normal approach, but the shipment was to be from the United Kingdom and the reversal occured only 1 week after payment was made.

Further (according to the seller) it appears the seller notified the buyer that they were awaiting the withdraw of the PayPal funds to their bank account, before shipping, allegedly due to the high shipping cost involved for the purchase. As most of us know funds withdrawal from PayPal to a bank account takes up to a week so to reverse the funds after 7 days is very unusual.

So the situation as it stands so far is:

• Payment made to PayPal Sep 29th 2009
• Payment withdrawn to seller bank account Sep 29th 2009
• Payment arrives in sellers bank account Oct 5th 2009
• Payment reversed by buyers bank Oct 6th 2009
• Seller’s PayPal account goes into negative balance and is frozen

In this instance the seller is very lucky to have not shipped the goods, as the situation is highly suspicious and we would normally advise caution whenever a buyer acts in an unusual manner.

More info will be published, from the seller along with any response we get from the buyer, as we get it.

Username unavailable at this time

As was the policy on our main database site we will not name any suspect until the investigation has concluded and concluded in the seller’s favour. If it turns out to be a harmless mistake we will then be able to close the case anonymously.