Watch out - bike scam

Sad to see that a forum I was once involved with has been the 'victim' of a lot of scams involving the sale of motorcycles. The forum was part of the UKBike website, which was owned by a company I used to work for. In fact, it was how I was tempted back into biking after a few years' layoff. The guy who had been contracted to run the newly-acquired website asked all staff to write something for the web content, and I duly obliged with a few stories and reviews. This got me thinking, then I 'happened' to call by my local dealership one day, and within a week or two I was back on two wheels. For a while, the forum was lively, but the parent company neglected it and, as is the way with these things, the forum died the death.

I logged in there a few moments ago, just out of curiosity, and there have been a few posts there since I left, most of which concern a scam that seems to be gaining momentum, especially through low-cost advertisers like Friday-Ad, where the level of supervision of the advertisers is necessarily minimal. It's a classic scam which no-one with any common sense would be taken in by, but it seems to be working with some:

• Advert appears in a small-ads paper (or its associated website) for a desirable bike at a suspiciously low price
• Caller responds and is given details and an email contact
• Bike is held at a 'shipping agent' and money must be sent to the agent by Moneygram or Western Union and held there
  
• When money is received, bike will be delivered to buyer
• When buyer is happy with the purchase, agent will send money to seller.

Of course, the bike doesn't exist (or it does, but is advertised over and over again), and the latter two stages of the process never happen. Once the money is sent, nothing more is heard. One chap has posted his unfortunate experiences on the forum, and another has done his research at Companies House and has listed all the dodgy directorships of the person involved, who claims to sell bikes this way because he is a welder on a North Sea oil rig and is selling the bike to raise money while he is away.

It's amazing that, in this day and age, people are still being taken in by scams like this. But some people seem to be trusting souls - perhaps bikers more than others, as we tend to band together and trust each other in a way that doesn't happen elsewhere. A lot of the anger is being directed at the website and publication, for hosting the adverts in the first place.

In the old, old words, which cannot be repeated often enough: if something looks too good to be true, it probably is.