Police did not seem intered in helping recover the £650 computer
A teenager travelled 70 miles to track down the eBay scammers who had tricked him into mailing them his £650 laptop. Blake Walker only realised he had been duped after he’d posted the Apple MacBook to an address in Essex, believing he had sold it legitimately through the online auction site.
The 19-year-old from Whitfield reported the suspected fraud to police, but fearing officers would not act quickly enough, he and his mum drove to the address themselves in a bid to recover the computer. The shop worker had listed the laptop on eBay on June 29 and was thrilled when it was quickly snapped up. Soon afterwards he received what appeared to be a genuine email from eBay telling him the buyer had paid in full, but that the money would only be released once he had provided proof the laptop had been posted.
Trusting the message, Blake sent the computer by recorded delivery to the address in Tilbury, Essex. But when no payment appeared in his account, he contacted eBay and was told he had likely fallen victim to a scam and that the email had not been sent by the company.
Blake reported the incident to Kent Police via 101, but says he was passed between police forces in Kent, London and Essex. “I thought if the police went there straight away they could do something,” he said. “But they said they didn’t do that. It was just going back and forth.”
On July 1, Blake and his mum decided their only hope of getting the laptop back was to drive to the address where it had been delivered. His mum even prepared an empty parcel so she could pose as a delivery driver to reduce the chances of them being turned away.
When they arrived, they discovered the address was a restaurant, with several people working inside. “There were quite a few of them, so I wouldn’t say it was threatening, but you get a bit nervous when there’s more and more,” Blake said. “When we first got there they were obviously claiming innocence.”
Blake was able to produce the delivery confirmation photograph showing the parcel had been delivered to the premises. “After about 15 minutes, they admitted they take items at the door and put them on top of a fridge in the restaurant and then someone else comes to collect them,” he said.
After Blake’s mum called Essex Police, staff told the pair someone was on his way. “They said, ‘We’ve got a guy coming’ and then I was a bit worried, so we stood a bit further away,” Blake explained. A visibly nervous man then emerged from the back of the building.
“This guy came out from the back and he came over to us and he was just really nervous, like properly shaking, sweating,” he said. After speaking to the pair for several minutes, the man went back inside before returning carrying Blake’s laptop. Blake says the man insisted the fake email “had nothing to do with him” and even showed messages on his phone which Blake believes suggested parcels received at the address were later shipped to Nigeria.
The confrontation lasted about 90 minutes before Blake and his mum began the journey home with the recovered laptop. “We were very happy,” he said. “We had the music on in the car, phoning everyone we could to tell them. We were not expecting it. At most I thought we’d get proof it was there.”
After recovering the computer, Blake’s mum contacted Essex Police again and completed an online crime report. She also told officers they had made an audio recording of the encounter but were unable to email it because the file was too large. Blake says she was told officers would visit to take a statement and collect the recording, but they have not heard anything since.
Essex Police has been repeatedly contacted for comment. Blake believes the scammers obtained his email address after asking him to send a video of the laptop before it was posted, allowing them to send a convincing fake payment email outside eBay’s messaging system.
Buyers’ account suspended
An eBay spokesperson said the buyer’s account has since been suspended. They said: “We’d like to apologise for the experience your reader had on eBay, and can confirm that the buyer’s account has been suspended. We encourage our users to only communicate with other users through eBay messages, and to only ship items once payment has been received. If users are unsure whether an email from eBay is genuine they can also check their eBay messages, as all emails from eBay are also sent as messages.”
The fake email closely resembled a genuine eBay payment notification but came from a Gmail address rather than an official eBay account. It falsely claimed Blake’s payment would only be released after he uploaded tracking information and the laptop had been delivered. Looking back on the ordeal, Blake admits he never expected to become the victim of an online scam.
“Obviously you hear about scams all the time and I never thought that I’d fall for something,” he said. “There’s people who are more vulnerable who could suffer worse from this. They could be selling something to pay their rent or buy food, and being scammed could put them in a horrible position.”
Despite successfully recovering his laptop, Blake urged others not to follow his example. “We were probably lucky,” he said. “Anything could have happened. It’s certainly dangerous to do what we did.”
