Google has indeed, alright, not only google, the World Wide Web has indeed given a lot of opportunities to people in growing and also at the same time to perform cyber criminal, like a scam. As our tag line reads, we are trying our best to secure the transactions, we not only keen in getting every transaction closed quickly and smoothly, we have a team behind to perform all sorts of possible investigations.

Here’s the story, the date stated 27 February and one of our very first clients before we even launched the service, requested us to be his escrow agent in Malaysia. It is a transaction between him and a seller in UK for selling a Honda Stream at RM 35k after negotiation (how did we know? because our client forwarded us the email conversation between him and the UK seller). The UK seller claimed that the car was locally inspected in Malaysia. He bought the car in Malaysia a while ago when he was working here, and since he has been transferred back to UK for work, and the car is a right-hand drive, he took this car along to his homeland.

After couple of months, he claimed that his company got him a company car so he decided to sell off the current Honda Stream at RM 35,000 to our Malaysian client (buyer). We smelled fish in this. Indeed! It is very fishy. How is it possible someone would want to take so much hassle getting approximately 7K UK Pound and he (seller) even agreed to pay all the shipping, taxes as well as logistics fees.

Several measures the Escrow.my team has taken into account from some online research and analysis done based on their email conversation :

1 The advertisement about this car was both posted in AutoWorld (19 Jan 2010) and Mudah.my. The seller even claimed that his location is in Kuala Lumpur in AutoWorld’s website. However, the post was deleted. Results were based on Google cache search engine.
   
2 The picture displayed in Mudah.my and AutoWorld was too graphically edited. As though it was flawless. Think about it? Is it necessary to censor the car number plate? If the seller wanted it for privacy protect, he would have the original picture with the number plate on. Why is he hiding? Here’s the question.

   
3 The address provided by the seller was not a residential location, rather, a city area / urban / office area.
   
4 Seller claimed to not remember the number plate and the registration card number, it was sealed together with the car in the container (For your information, keeping an item in the container is charged, and how would he be getting back the return by selling such car in just approximately 7K UK Pound)
   
5 Containing an item in the container from 19 Jan 2010 until today 27 Jan 2010 is way too much cost to make the car price to be sold at RM 35,000

This is just too good to be real. You might have found a similar case here.