Warning: Potential Amazon scam

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iainfm

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Hi,

Searching Amazon at the moment for a 70-200 F2.8 L IS USM II will yield a result for someone selling one at £664. Trying to order it direct isn't possible because of postage restrictions on the item, and contacting the seller at the address in the listing (thebestmarket@tech-center.com) leads to a request to buy a printable Amazon gift card and send them the code.

I've done a bit of digging around this, and the tech-centre.com address is hosted by Google (I've reported it as phishing). Replies from it come from UK IP addresses, which I suspect are compromised routers or WiFi hotspots.

Needless to say I didn't take the seller up on their kind offer.

Cheers,
Iain

PS if anyone genuinely has one of the above lenses available at this price, I'll take it at asking :D
 
I looked into this company myself last week as like you I was in the market for the same lens.... Things just didn't stack up for me so went to HDEW instead, and that's been delivered today.
 
boliston said:
I have heard of postage restrictions on batteries but on lenses?
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It's part of the scam to prevent you ordering it through Amazon, and thereby having buyer protection.

When you choose the delivery address, it says it's not available, so you email them. They then ask you to pay by Amazon gift card, which (if you went through with) they presumably cash/spend and you get no lens and no comeback because you've bought (and given away) a voucher.

Nothing to do with postage restrictions of hazardous materials etc :)
 
I've picked up on these a number of times - glad someone else has spotted it.
 
rob-nikon said:
Can't Amazon just remove the seller? To be honest if it's not Amazon UK I'm buying from then I treat it as a scam, many marketplace sellers are useless.
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They are usually hacked accounts. Generally if you look at what they normally sell it's not cameras or electronics. The email address you are asked to contact in the listing does not belong to the genuine owner of the account. That's just to stop you using Amazon's messaging system and alerting them.
 
Thanks for the warning. Good to know as the scammers are trying anything to catch us up. As a rule, if it's too good to be true, most probably something is
not quite right.
 
These come up all the time on Amazon, easily spotted as all of a sudden pretty much every lens you search for will have an obscenely low price showing up. They usually get deleted reasonably quickly.
 
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