 |
|
| CURRENT SECTION :: News | UK's most visited IT Contractor Site - 250k unique visitors March 2008 |
|
 |
A Romanian town that won European Union cash to boost its enterprising IT skills has been singled out to eBay users as a hotspot for fraud. Hundreds of residents of Dragasani have apparently grown rich by tempting the site’s users with items that most people would realise are, in fact, too good to be true. Speaking to the Sunday Times, the town’s mayor Gheorghe Iordache said “naive” Americans were the most common target of the scammers, who often pose as Britons to avoid suspicion. “Local guys who don’t work” suddenly have apartments in Germany, Bucharest and Holland, while others use their crimes’ proceeds to buy BMWs, Mercedes or Porsches, he added. Figures cited by the paper from Romania’s national cyber-crime unit show there were 752 arrests and 84 convictions in 2006, including one case involving the sum of £150,000. One prominent scam is the ‘second chance’ auction: eBay users just miss out on an item only to be invited by the crook to buy the same item outside of the site’s rules. The item, of course, doesn’t exist and in using payment methods outside of eBay the victim has no recourse to their lost monies. The scale of the hoax deals – which reportedly include an online auction of Dragasani’s town hall - is such that eBay said it has spent “millions” fighting scammers inside Romania. Over the past three years, however, the EU has funded IT training courses in the town to the tune of £150,000 in the light of its residents’ competency on computers. Feb 4, 2008 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
|
|
  |
||||||||||||||||||||||||
| All content © Contractor UK Limited | http://www.contractoruk.com/lists/?p=subscribe&id=1[Register for News Letter] | [Privacy Statement] | [Terms of Use] | [Top of Page] |