Is Your Digital Electronics a reliable supplier?
Answers: Discount Electronics Site Called a Scam !
see the review in PC-mag :
( or you can read the productive article in
theire website :
http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,12...
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Discount Electronics Site Called a Scam
ARTICLE DATE: 11.15.07
By Mark Hachman, ExtremeTech
Would you be suspicious of an American e-commerce site that required a $500 minimum purchase, didn't adopt credit cards, and asked you to send a money charge to an address in Italy?
Jeff Garstecki, a PC Magazine reader, be. But the design of YourDigitalElectronics.com was sophisticated, professional, and offered prices low enough to come up on the Google Products shopping page—too moral to be true, Garstecki believed. His suspicions and those of others were borne out when Garstecki and others started checking out the site using conventional methods, such as a christen to the police, as well as newer tools close to Google Street View, which can be used to assist citizen sleuths.
ADVERTISEMENT Calls to YourDigitalElectronics using the information provided on its contact page were instantly transferred to a record that did not identify the company and told the caller to name back subsequently, with no opportunity to transcript a message. An email to the company was not returned.
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On first viewing the site, YourDigitalElectronics.com looks sophisticated, providing smoothly accessed list of products, organized by type, manufacturer information, enlargeable pictures, privacy and return policies, and even contact information. The site also offer competitive pricing, with substantial discounts on popular merchandise. A "whois" domain turn out reveals that the site was launch just days ago, on Halloween.
"Looking at this site, it looks amazing," Garstecki said. "But it's a total scam."
Purchases want "safety net"
If one attempts to in actual fact purchase something from the site, however, a consumer will run into a roadblock: a minimum purchase is required, which site users say be previously $750, and now have been dropped to $500. Although the site claims it accept Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal, site users say the singular payment prospect available to them is a Western Union money order. And when the purchase have been approved, the site asks them to kind out the money order to an agent at a Rome address, and afterwards e-mail or fax a copy of the money order to the company's headquarters contained by Orange, Calif.
However, money orders are inherently smaller quantity secure than other forms of pay, such as a credit card. The Federal Trade Commission's online shopping page recommends that consumers avoid using flex transfers when making online purchases.
"Wire transfers can be useful when you want to convey funds to someone you know or trust—but they are not appropriate when you are doing business with a stranger," the FTC site say. "Why? If you wire money to buy an item from an Internet auction site—either through a money transmitter or directly to someone's sandbank account—and something goes wrong, it is extremely likely that you will lose your allowance and have no recourse."
A spokeswoman for the FBI said that the agency could not confirm or deny whether the site is underneath investigation.
However, YourDigitalElectronics.com's headquarters is either an apartment building, a motel, if not a vacant lot, according to Google Maps and Garstecki. In an interview, Garstecki said he phoned the local Better Business Bureau, which have no records of the business, and the City of Orange police department, which confirmed that the business have no physical address. A desk officer reported that the department's press officer said the department was performing an investigation, but decline further comment.
Garstecki even went so far as to try and track down the distribution warehouse within Ladoga, Ind., a town of approximately 1,000 people. "I talk to one woman, who said she knew everybody," Garstecki said. "She said she'd never hear of anything like that."
The other address on the YourDigitalElectronics.com Web site, a "logistics department" surrounded by Worcester, Mass., appears to be hidden beneath an Amtrak train track.
Unlike so-called "phishing" e-mails, which can contain several spelling and grammatical errors that can warn sour potential victims, the YourDigitalElectronics.com site is comprehensive, and for the most part, very well thought out. The site says its products are "brand bright." According to its return policy, customers may return defective merchandise for a refund.
The just place the site breaks from its well-organized look and grain, though, is on one page, where the site explains its pricing policy: "If you will ask yourself in the region of the pricess we have you must know that our policy is terribly simple.We are trying to serve he best interest of the market and we are trying to trade the product at minimal pricess so we can make a lot'ss of customers.We hold our billing department in Europe for levy reasons and this road we can make discounts up to 40%-50%." Next: A Network of Scam Sites?
Under the vocabulary and conditions page, however, the site refuses to honor returns of any box or monitor, defective or not. Furthermore, while the site claims that all products ship next to a manufacturer warranty, "extended warranty, computer desktops and notebooks, printers, Sony cameras and camcorders, as okay as all small screen equipment" cannot be returned for credit, exchanged, or returned for a refund. All returned products must be shipped put a bet on to YourDigitalElectronics at the user's expense, are subject to a 15 percent restocking fee, and may be rejected if written on, dilapidated, "abused," or if parts are missing, the terms page read.
Whether or not the YourDigitalElectronics actually ships any merchandise, parts of the site appear to be outright fraudulent. A ScanAlert "Hacker Safe" trust logo if truth be told loads from the site itself, and a spokesman for ScanAlert said the logo was human being used without approval. "Our position on it is that we will pursue the issue," said Nigel Ravenhill, director of marketing communication for ScanAlert. "We have, contained by the past, usually successfully resolved them."
In Europe, Scan Alert have begun deploying Flash-based version of the "Hacker Safe" logo to prevent unauthorized use, but hasn't shifted the practice to all of its United States customers, Ravenhill said.
A gridiron of similar sites?
Garstecki believes that the YourDigitalElectronics site may be tied to YokoElectronics.com, a site that appears to be linked to ElectroForLess.com. Links on that site also citation Electronics Outpost, a site that appears to be defunct. The ElectroForLess site lists contacts surrounded by Jamaica, N.Y., logistics in Atlanta, and—like YourDigitalElectronics—a billing department contained by Rome, Italy. Like YourDigitalElectronics, the site appears to have charged a minimum directive, and only accept Western Union money orders. The ElectroForLess site's contact information includes voice communication, but calls be not returned.
"It looks so legitimate that you get hold of off track," Garstecki said of the YourDigitalElectronics site. "Heck, they do a better opening [at selling via the Web] of even some of the legit guys."
YourDigitalElectronics has prompted several threads at A/V sites across the Web, most of which found the nouns of credit cards suspicious. "We've seen this same scammer at least possible twice already. Same website design. Same M.O.: new domain heading, hidden contact info, untraceable gift methods, etc.," one poster noted on the FatWallet forums.
"When you see a site with prices that are too devout to be true, and they only adopt Wire Transfers or Paypal and not credit cards then it's other a scam to get your bread and run," wrote RandyWalters on the AVS Forums page. "Some of these sites are very convincing. On another forum a guy purely drove by this company's address in Orange, California and it's a motel! They also hold no history on Resellerratings dot com. I like how they gleefully influence 'your private information is secure because we don't adopt credit cards', yet they enjoy all the central credit card logos displayed. They also claim that payment is routed through Europe to set free administration costs and they slip away this on to their customers. What a crock !!"
YourDigitalElectronics uses a service from PrivacyProtect.org to anonymize the domain registration. ElectroforLess uses the same service.
Still, the site's creators go to an obvious amount of endeavour to create the site, which leaves some scratching their head. "If he went to the trouble of getting it coded, why not of late use it to run a legitimate business?" ScanAlert's Ravenhill said.
Copyright (c) 2007Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved.
No, I wouldn't trust them. The simply form of payment they seem to be to accept is Western Union Transfers, which points to it anyone nothing but a scam. Prices are basically too good to be true. Also, the trellis site is half-baked and the text be written by a non-native English speaker. Probably one of those Eastern European scams.
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