Hi, I was looking to buy some high-end speakers. Found that the ones I wanted were on sale on one of the NZ home theater companies that google showed me.
However the website said free delivery, but the checkout tried to add 50$ delivery. So I contacted the shop by email to ask about that, and he said that was a mistake, and wrote me an invoice for the speakers without the delivery cost.
So I was about to pay the invoice this morning, everything looked correct:
*Their website looks real
*They have a PriceSpy profile (though with no reviews)
*They have 4 5-star reviews on Google
*They have a Facebook page with 1 positive review, with pictures of a branded home theater booth.
*It's a NZ bank account, with NZ home address in Auckland.
However before I paid,
*I searched the company on the company register and it says the company was dissolved in 2020
*There's no address for this store that he keeps referring to (for example he tried to sell me on a store-demo receiver)
*The website has too many holes, such as the "about us" page not working.
So I guess this may have been a real company a few years back, but now that their domain was made available it was bought by some scammers. I see the domain name is registered in Singapore.
I've heard about these scams, but this seems much more advanced then the ones I've heard about. The ones I heard about consisted of buying random domains, rather than domain names of actual previous stores then imitating those stores closely.
Also it was quite sophisticated how he's been trying to sell me an open-box receiver that was used in-store for 2 months, I thought scams were more obvious trying to sell you too-good-to-be-true deals, rather than a 3 year old poorly-reviewed receiver that's open-box.
Are there any good methods to report this scam? I have no hope on the police (someone stole something from my lawn and despite my security camera capturing his face, and despite me finding the guy on Facebook, the NZ police did nothing) but maybe there's a way to see what bank the account belongs to and contact that bank to flag the account or something.
PS. I didn't send any money, but I spent the whole weekend on this ordeal so my time was scammed nonetheless.



