Purported seller of used Can-Am Spyder roadster (trike) was advertising on www.adsinusa. Site with a price that was well under what I would consider fair market value. Price also supposedly included shipping to my location (from Laguna Beach, CA to Vancouver, WA).
I asked the seller, Edward Jones, a number of questions about the trike, including whether or not he had a sales inspection/condition report. That particular question went unanswered through an entire chain of e-mails.
He did indicate that he was in the U.K. "on business" currently, but provided an international telephone number. I never bothered to verify whether it is even a functional phone number. One of the other questions I asked was why he was selling the trike in the first place. He claims that his family is moving and joining him in the U.K., as his company is transferring him there.
The "deal" was supposed to use the escrow services of a third-party shipper, USC-Shipping. The Web site Ed provided to me, www.usc-shipping.com, appears to be legitimate when you first look at it, and I can't say for certain that it isn't. However, information Ed provided to me about how their services work conflicted with what was stated on the Web site.
At this point I was becoming more suspicious, especially since escrow/shipping companies seems to be a big fraud issue right now. I tried to find a legitimate business registration for USC-Shipping in the U.S. And only came up with an inactive business filing in the State of California, and it linked to only one individual with no known corporate officers.
Now I was really skeptical. So, in a final e-mail I suggested to Mr. Jones that if the trike truly was in Laguna Beach, CA, then he certainly would have no objection to me making the trip to California to inspect the trike personally, negotiate a deal there, and then arrange for transportation of it on my own. Being the "trusted businessman" that he is, Mr. Jones chose not to respond to this request!
I must say that I am equally concerned about the screening practices of www.adsinusa.com, too. There are a number of other listings on their site for similar Can-Ams located throughout the U.S. I used the same contact info for at least four others, and used essentially the same text in all of the requests, yet Mr. Jones is the only one to have replied... Yet. I suspect all of these ads may be related to the same scammer (s).
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