13 December 2010

After seven straight days of WikiLeaks nobody should be surprised by the global power of the internet. But here’s a cautionary tale from rather closer to home.

What can you do if somebody is ripping off your customers and your brand with a scam website and a web address close to your own? The answer, on the evidence I’ve seen this week, is ‘not much’. And, what’s more, it would appear the national law enforcement authorities are equally powerless to help.

This story starts when Roger Woodward, managing director of CD Auction Group, was alerted to the fact that his trading name, Cars Direct, and his logo was being used on a scam website. The fake site gives an address in the Isle of Man and claims to have been trading for over seven years.

It doesn’t take much to discover that all is not quite what it seems. For a start, the site itself is peppered with obvious errors and spelling mistakes. The company seems to have a massive number of cars in stock (we counted over 250 4x4s alone). The address in the Isle of Man doesn’t exist and the phone number belongs to a guy running a furniture shop.

But there is an online chat facility and you can order cars – all you have to do is wire the money to their bank account and the car will be delivered (free!) within three to five days.

If this was a physical car lot that you had concerns about the solution would be simple: phone up the local Trading Standards. But a car lot in cyberspace, on a website hosted in Asia, is rather more difficult.

Not surprisingly, Roger’s local police (Corby) weren’t too interested; the local Trading Standards said they couldn’t deal with cross-border fraud. The Isle of Man authorities know about it but they can’t go banging on the door of an address that doesn’t exist. There is a government agency (Action Fraud) but that’s for individuals who’ve been ripped off – they suggested reporting it to the local police!

This is not just about Cars Direct. There’s an HPI logo on the website and the stock details have been lifted from genuine car supermarket and other sites. Even number plates are visible. So more than one genuine business is being harmed.

This story has implications for us all. Ironically, it seems the most effective action against the site is being taken by anti-scam hackers (whose work I couldn’t possibly condone) who seem to have come across this particular operator before – there’s a similar scam running in the USA, sitting on an auto-mall URL.

For a while the site was down but, currently, it’s back up again. If you have a solution to the problem, please let me know and I’ll share it with you all.

Have a great week, both in and out of the showroom. If you have a story for us, or want to get something off your chest, email rupert@auto-retail.com

Rupert Saunders

Tags: Agenda, cyber sitters, internet, This Week, web, wikileaks