Scammers Advertising Through Google Ads
As you might have noticed, I run some ads on my website. Today I ran into an add for a new Nikon D300 with a price of 799 euro’s.
Note that at the moment a relatively cheap Nikon D300 costs at least 1400 euro’s, and if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is. Since I have no intention of buying a second D300, I decided to check the add out.
The add links to this page this page this page. A nice overview of the available Nikon D300.
A bit of research reveals the following about this site;
- Company is based in China, and uses MSN to communicate.
- The user comments on the D300 page aren’t very encouraging.
- Payments are only done through Western Union Money Transfers (or other services which guarantees you 100% that you’ll never be able to get your money back)
- Returning goods is done by sending them to another company (escgate.com; ‘Save Moeny Now!!
) - Every piece of hardware is almost half the regular price
- Oh and, there are real world experiences with escgate.com (dutch forum) -> Babelfish translation
Anyway, more than enough warnings if you ask me.
B.t.w. Western Union money transfers are a great way of sending people money in e.g. Africa. It’s not all that bad, just as long as you don’t expect anything in return 
UPDATE: found another naughty website. Same products (same product database [1, 2]), same conditions, but different layout and name.
The following list are webshops which are as ‘real’ as the first one I found.
- http://www.ecnnow.com [offline]
- http://www.shop-beijing.com [offline]
- http://www.leonoshop.com
- < your website here?? >
Tags: china, Photography, scam, western union
June 2nd, 2008 at 8:47 pm
Yeah right I’ve been consistently getting water conversion kit scam ads from Google. The irony of the situation is that the website is a scam but the add reads:
Run You Car on Water SCAM
Obviously someone added the words at Google.
June 2nd, 2008 at 9:21 pm
The funny thing is that I read that form post about someone falling for one of those sites. I thought that those things only happen through spammails (watches, software, viagra, etc.). But even websites you end up on through Google ads are possibly scams.