A study break on a night before the exam has turned out to be a costly affair for this final year nursing student from Bendigo.
Bhupinder Dhaliwal thought he had chanced upon a fabulous deal for an otherwise expensive electric bike, which was advertised for just $99 on one of those pop-up ads that crowd Facebook.
Snapshot of the advertisement that appeared on Mr Dhaliwal's Facebook feed Source: Supplied
Mr Dhaliwal told SBS Punjabi that when he clicked on the link, it redirected him to ‘Imbun.com’-a domain which he later realized was a fake and didn’t even exist.
“I entered my credit card details and when I clicked, I realized that a total of $138 had been deducted from my card, as against the advertised price of $99”- Bhupinder Dhaliwal Image
Shocked and unnerved at the prospect of losing more money, Mr Dhaliwal tried every trick in the book to exhaust his credit card limit.
“I made an ATM withdrawal, filled up my car tank to exhaust the limit”, said Mr Dhaliwal.
“When I called up my bank to register a complaint, they told me that a transaction worth about $700 had been made using my credit card.”-Bhupinder Dhaliwal
He told SBS Punjabi that the bank has assured him that he would be reimbursed within three weeks of making the complaint, provided the cash was actually transferred to a fraudulent account and he himself had not contributed to the loss.
At the time of writing this, the bogus link was still active.
Mr Dhaliwal now wants to alert members of the community against such scams, which have become quite commonplace in Australia.
“It’s a lesson learnt for life. It’s any day better to use PayPal. It’s not safe to give out your card details. Beware”- Bhupinder Dhaliwal
There is an old saying which goes "if it's too good to be true, it probably is." But fewer people seem to be paying heed to it.
According to Scamwatch- a service run by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to curtail online frauds, 3,472 complaints relating to online shopping frauds have already been registered in 2018, worth more than $1.4 million in total.
warns that most of these scamming websites have perfect layouts pretending to be legitimate either with a fake portal or a fake ad on a genuine retailer website.
The service claims that the most obvious sign of a hoax is that the products offered on such websites are usually advertised at unbelievably cheap prices to attract vulnerable customers and does not usually allow payment through a secure gateway like PayPal.
So next time, if you feel the product price advertised is too good to be true, run a thorough check before you proceed to make the payment.
