People often times come to me with weird situations with technology. Most of the time, someone contacts me after they realize they have been scammed, or bamboozled if you will, by some new phishing scam or customer support fraud. I’m usually given a brief story of what happened, and maybe a phone number, email, or a URL related to the scam.
I just received a statement from someone stating that a relative of theirs was trying to purchase a cat. I have no details on the purchase yet, other than the fact that they paid $700 (yikes! for a cat?!), and that they were told they could track the cat through royal-express-usa[.]com. I called my source for a few more details, but because it did not happen to them, they were unable to provide all of the details, but went to collect more for me.
The story starts off with someone’s mom wanting to purchase a bengal kitten. They began their search online and come across royalbengalkittensforsale[.]com. The person is excited and interested in purchasing a cat and begins corresponding with the sales person. She said only one correspondence happened over email, while the rest happened via text message. (804) 463-5843 is the number listed on the website, and this is the phone number the buyer was corresponding with. The seller requests half of the payment up front, and then the second half of the payment after sending the rest of the money. The seller requests the money through CashApp under an account name I was not provided. The seller sends a “tracking code” that can be tracked through royal-express-usa.com. After sending the tracking code, the seller requests the sender to send the other half of the money to another name via CashApp “because they had hit their daily limit.” The CashApp Tag was $yanze1.
Googling the domain name returns the expected website, but is also returns links to a scam adviser site. The scam adviser site says it is unknown to be malicious, but it does state that the domain was registered for 13 days prior to my search. WhoIs should tell me the same thing. Red Flag.
The website appears to be built in less than a day. There are typos and grammatical errors that a reputable business would not have. An individual sell might make these mistakes, but this is site represents a business of “Hybrid Bengal Kittens." Reviewing the website shows plenty of red flags and leads me to believe this is likely a scam.
A quick Google search of the phone number revealed the following post.
Ok, if it was not obvious already, it should be now. This is definitely a scam, and clearly it is working. Based off of this phone call I received and the screenshot above, this person has collected at least $2,450. Even if that is the only money the scammers collected, thats way more than I am making off of steem currently. There are clearly multiple domains registered for this scam. I find it unlikely that this is these are the only two successful occurrences.
At this point I picked up the phone and let the buyer know that it was definitely a scam and they needed to file a police report and call their bank. I told them there may or may not be much of anything that can be done to recover your money, but having the situation documented properly would likely prove beneficial. Luckily there was little to no personal information submitted to the scammers. Only irrevocable payments made. CashApp is owned by Square Inc. Here is a link to their instructions on disputing charges. https://squareup.com/help/us/en/article/3882-payment-disputes-walkthrough
