I placed an expensive Breitling watch on eBay for auction and was contacted by email by a bidder who wanted to pay the "buy it now" price of $2,695. I specified payment via PayPal in my listing, but the buyer wanted to use an escrow service, and said he had good experience with austrian-online.com.
Here is a photo of the watch that was sold via the fake escrow company, Austrian-online.com. The selling price was $2,695 which I never recovered.
I went to their site and it looked pretty good to me (never having used an escrow company before). The site was slick, sent me an automated email in HTML when I registered, and had a testimonials page that looked legit. I agreed to do the sale via the escrow service, and set up the transaction in on austrian-online's web site, specifying that the payment should be wired to my bank account.
Soon after I received an email from austrian-line saying that money had been received from the buyer and that I could send the watch. I FedExed the watch to an address in Spain. I tracked the watch and saw that it was delivered on Thursday, July 15th. I contacted austrian-online to let them know it was delivered, and sent them the tracking number so they could see that. I received an email reply from austrian online says that yes, they confirmed that the watch was delivered. They further said that the buyer had 48 hours to reject the watch, and if they didn't hear anything from them in that time I would be sent the money automatically.
I checked my bank account on the following Monday and saw that there was no sign of the transfer taking place. I sent an email to austrian-online asking them when they money transfer would take place, since the buyer had not rejected the watch within the 48 hour period, and I got a reply stating that they didn't understand why I was so upset since it was only Monday and they didn't work on the weekend. I sent them another email asking them when they were going to wire the money and have had no reply since then.
I do not know whether there is a legitimate austrian-online escrow company. I have seen that some scam artists have been able to hijack a legitimate business's web site, take over their address somehow, and lure unsuspecting victims into parting with their money.
I would just say that anyone who is approached during a web auction about executing a transaction via an escrow site of any kind should be very careful in checking the bona fides of the esrow company. I will never use an online escrow service again other than the one operated by eBay.
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