Victim Location 87547
Type of a scam Online Purchase
Another email address used when trying to collect payment is [email protected]
Originally I responded to a Freecycle add offering a free piano. Three weeks later I got an email from the giver, Rebecca Daniels, saying she had been busy moving (from Santa Fe, NM to California) and was sorry she was late in responding. She didn’t want to leave a piano in the empty house so it was currently with the moving company. She could make arrangements for them to get it to me but it may incur charges. She set up a referral # and gave me the phone number to call and website. I contacted the moving company, moverandpackercourier.com or Movers&Packers Transport And Courier (I saw many different variations of these words on the website so I wasn’t quite sure what the official name was — the invoice had the name I stated). They said the piano was already in Pasadena, CA and I had 2 options: pick it up or have it shipped. I asked for the price to ship it. The piano was a Kawai baby grand piano by the way that she said her husband played and he wouldn’t want her to be selling it. The quoted price had 3 choices of prices depending on the speed of delivery. The slowest was a 10-day delivery for $450. That was a small price to pay for such a nice piano. Of course if I had been moving I’d never pay to have the movers take it away — I would have had the freecycle recipient pick it up. So I was already suspect.
The next day I had trouble calling them. The website didn’t have an address. I finally got a hold of them through a chat option of the website which I have the conversations. The gave me the address which I looked on Google maps was a building for lease. I figured it could be a recently made company and the Google picture may have been older. I asked if I could pick the piano up. They said sure but they would not be responsible for damage. I asked if a friend could come see it. They said sure but it was wrapped so they couldn’t see anything. I asked if I could pay for it on delivery. They said if it were an instate delivery yes but out of state no. I asked if I could pay partial up front and the rest on delivery. They said 60%.
So I decided to use a credit card even though on the website it said that they temporarily couldn’t process debit or credit cards. On the chatline they said they wouldn’t take my credit card on the phone but they could on their secure email.
They made an invoice and sent it to my email for the partial payment of $270.27 of the $450.45. I gave them my credit card information for a card I don’t use a lot. The next morning the credit card company asked about the charge from "White Pages". I called the credit card company. they said the first charge was for $4.99.
At this point the pay_verification email address started emailing asking me to verify charges. I asked them if they were the "White Pages" and they responded yes, your charge was not authorized please use another payment method. All the other payment methods like Zelle, Paypal, or a cash app had 2 differing women’s names as the cashier name or something with "shorty." I insisted on using my credit card (which they said was a debit card at first) and they replied with an email saying, "Your card was earlier declined, for that reason we were trying to
verify the ownership of the information you provided. We have received a couple of complains regarding credit card fraud and wanted to verify.
However your transaction can’t be processed as you did not authorize the payment. Regards Ruth."
Well, there is overwhelming evidence now that this is fraud. We changed our credit card number and reported them to Freecycle and you.