Yes indeed, I was mugged. Totally. The camera I purchased online turned out to be scammers who had hijacked an Amazon account of a respected seller.
 It goes like this:
- Scammers hack into a well established Amazon seller account, and disable order processing functionality to the target country, so no orders can be processed.
- They drop the price of the electrical equipment to a very low but not unrealistic value, which you try and order.
- It doesn’t go through – looking like a website error - it wont ship to the UK; So you use the amazon contact form to contact the seller.
- At this point, your confidence In the seller is faultless as until now, it is the amazon seller you are talking to, as far as you know.
- They send you an “order” (as attached) (from “amazon.co.uk” and ask you to wire a moneygram to Italy for the product at the value it was advertised.
- You send the cash – they collect the cash….thats that.
What you don’t realize is that there is no order on your account at amazon, it doesn’t exist.
I am in the process of hacking away at Amazon to take some responsibility for the security breach on their site which led me to misplace my trust. I’m also going to the papers in a bid to find some kind local camera shop who will hijack the publicity for their own good and give me a free camera! Oh yeah and I’ll call the police.
Just don’t fall in the same trap as me. And ALWAYS pay with credit card through Amazon Payments, where your purchase is protected.
One Pissed Off Bunny, Who is ÂŁ250 quid short.
 Jon
March 16th, 2008 at 12:57 am
BASTARDS! Have you got any cash back from them yet??
March 16th, 2008 at 9:50 am
No….not yet…
I am having “talks” with amazon. I am close to proving that they knew the account had been hacked 2 days before I paid my money (At least); My argument is that their responsibility was to mail anyone who had been in contact with the account during its compromised period; they did not do this.
Trouble is - they are claiming the seller is behaving illegally, and have not to date admitted the account is hacked. I have an email from the seller saying tha account was hacked on sunday and that amazon have been working to fix it all week, and they still cant login.
I hope they will extend their amazon A to Z protection in this case as their store was effectively broken into, which instigated the whole sorry affair.
March 19th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Have had exactly the same issue with exactly the same seller.
Let me know how you get on with Amazon. I got exactly the same “not covered by Amazon A-Z guarantee” response as you did.
March 19th, 2008 at 11:22 pm
They keep avoiding me - not calling me back, then sending the generic email response again.
I will call them tomorrow morning and basically tell them I’m pretty disgusted at the companies method of handling my enquiry, and that I’m going to the local newspaper about it, they are already preparing the story for me….It just depends if Amazon want to give it a happy ending or not.
To date, they still havent sent an email warning me that the account was compromised and not to trust the email contacts made through their site during this period. The truth is that I am pretty disgusted about that - they don’t care about their customers one bit. They are more worried that sending around emails admitting an account was hacked will damage their public image. Allegedly.
I will do as much damage as I can.
March 22nd, 2008 at 8:36 pm
Looks like i have been done by these scammers as well. but mine was for a tv for ÂŁ450.
Im gutted as it took a year to save up and now its all gone.
We will be making an approach to amazon tomorrow to see what they can do, but I’m not holding my breath
March 23rd, 2008 at 1:18 pm
You should also go to BBC Watchdog, and maybe the Mail on Sunday as the Finance section in this paper deals with scams and they may well contact Amazon on your behalf and get a better result.
March 23rd, 2008 at 1:45 pm
Thanks Steve, I will try that!
April 2nd, 2008 at 8:29 am
Hi chaps, I was done too by the same low lives for the sum of ÂŁ310, trying to buy a Panasonic TX-26LXD70 from Amazon last Thursday. The names and email addresses they use are:
popcorn
electromart
mobileit
janicetk72@googlemail.com
janicetk@googlemail.com
commmgr-autoreply@amazon.co.uk
Amazon Communication Center
commmgr_buyer@amazon.co.uk
spartes56@gmail.com
katana spartes
Amazon.co.uk Payments
payments-messages@amazon.co.uk
Maria Florea
They could be emailing from virtually anywhere in the world. I hope these messages will be of use to anyone else trying to use Amazon. All they need to do is do a Google search for these names.
As for Amazon, they don’t really seem to be interested on the individual cases. All they say is ‘have you reported it’ and ‘we are looking into it’ !!!!!!
Crypton