Someone claiming to sell a used Can-Am Spyder roadster (a trike) had listed it on www.adsinusa.com for far less than I would regard as fair market value. The asking price was also said to cover delivery from Laguna Beach, CA all the way to me in Vancouver, WA.
The seller, Edward Jones, received several questions from me about the trike, one of them being whether a sales inspection or condition report existed. Across a whole series of emails, he never addressed that point.
He did mention that, for now, he was "on business" in the U.K., and he gave me an international phone number, which I never took the trouble to check was even in service. I also asked him why he wanted to sell the trike at all. According to him, his employer was relocating him to the U.K., and his family was moving over to be with him.
The so-called "deal" was to run through escrow handled by a third-party shipping firm, USC-Shipping. At first glance the site Ed sent me, www.usc-shipping.com, looks genuine, and I cannot be sure it is fake. Still, what Ed told me about how their service operates contradicted the description on that site.
By now my suspicions were growing, particularly because escrow and shipping outfits appear to be a major source of fraud these days. I searched for a valid U.S. business registration for USC-Shipping and found nothing except an inactive State of California filing, tied to a single person with no known corporate officers.
That made me truly doubtful. In my last email, I put it to Mr. Jones that, assuming the trike really was sitting in Laguna Beach, CA, he surely would not mind me traveling to California to look it over in person, work out a deal on the spot, and then organize shipping myself. Being the "trusted businessman" he is, Mr. Jones never answered that proposal!
I am just as worried about how www.adsinusa.com screens its listings. The site carries a number of other ads for similar Can-Ams in various parts of the U.S. I reached out to at least four of those sellers using the same contact details and nearly identical wording in every message, and so far only Mr. Jones has written back. My guess is that all of these ads could be tied to the same scammer(s).
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