Friday, May 23, 2014

Fraudulent website ( www.telco-tec.com, www.telco-tec-europe.com )

Quick post about the online shop I used recently which I believe is a fraudulent site, having discovered that the item I ordered never arrived and I had no correspondence from them.

Basically, DON'T USE THE FOLLOWING SITES:

www.telco-tec.com
www.telco-tec-europe.com

They appear like legitimate businesses but having looked into them in more details, I believe it's a massive fraud. Basically, their prices are slightly better than the competition so you are enticed to go for it and generally it looks like a good online business with lots of products. But, there are several reasons why you shouldn't do it, and I should have been more vigilant when I put the order through:

1. There is no correspondence from them once the order is placed. No email confirmation, nothing. You can create account on their website which supposedly allows you to track the order but it's very inaccurate and no tracking information is supplied. It looks fairly good for a fraudulent site but not good enough I guess.

2. When I paid for the product, their website embedded a third party credit card processing company system into the payment page, making it look like you are actually using their online payment system. It should have rung the bell to me when I noticed that the website had no security enabled (no https pages!), but I somehow thought that the credit card processing company actually deals with the payment stuff so maybe it was not absolutely essential. The credit card processing company they use is https://www.skrill.com/en/ which appears to be a legitimate business. Telco-tec.com (the fraud website) are basically using Skrill to siphon the money from buyer (i.e. me) to their account which they have provided to Skrill. Skrill is probably not even aware that these websites are fraudulent.

3. When I tried to raise a request (contact Telco-tec-europe.com), I realised they use a third party ticketing system, which is again embedded into their website, almost looking like it's part of their web shop design. However, it's clear that it's not when this site requests the same information from you, like email address, contact details, etc. That's when it became clear to me that this is definitely a fraudulent operation. In addition, as soon as I provided my email address into this system, I started receiving spam emails in German language, offering me a chance to use some gambling sites.

There is another site with description of what exactly this scam is about, you can find it here:
http://www.primrosebank.net/computers/scams.htm

The company in question is Galliardo AG, which runs www.telco-tec.com and www.telco-tec-europe.com fraudulent websites.

I hope someone finds this information useful before they place orders on these sites...