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May 10, 2013, 09:45:35 PM |
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I would like warn potential pre-order sellers to be aware of my interactions with user avantopia. This user claims to be an agent of Texas Atlantic Capital named Richard Kowalski acting attempting to acquire ASIC technology on behalf of Denton Jones. He uses a Google Voice phone number of 213-290-5887. I also received a call from a person claiming to be Denton Jones from 214-927-6604.
I will start by saying that I am not certain this is a scam, but there are aspects of this that appear strange. This post should serve to document any other experiences that people may have with this buyer.
Basically, the buyer wanted to transact by bank wire. I agreed to this. The buyer wanted to verify my preorders by logging into my account. This I refused, but attempted to get BFL to confirm to him by email. After quite a bit of back and forth that resulted in a public posting by myself on their forum, someone noted that there is a read only guest login on their site. When I sent the details of this to them to verify the order, there was little response from them and I called Richard and he verified by phone that he had gotten the email and saw it checked out and that they would have a meeting on it later. The next morning, I requested an update, to which he responded that they didn't have enough information to move forward and they were retracting their bid.
It's not really clear what is going on here. It could be a complicated phishing attempt, or it could just be a floundering buyer. What I will say is be very aware of this buyer. I opened a separate account to accept the bank wire (took me minutes and was free), and I would suggest the same for you.
In addition, this has personally set me back by two weeks in my desire to sell my preorders, and has occupied a small amount of my personal time. I am also concerned because the BFL system does give the delivery address when a person uses to verify, so there is some additional physical risk there.
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