Hi guys,
I'm posting this here not for sympathy, but to make sure that someone else doesn't become victim to the same scam when the research this "company".
I found someone on LinkedIn going by the name of Van Coleman (who has been kicked off since) who was saying that he worked for a company called PremiumCryptoMiners.com in Georgia . I went onto the web chat and asked them if he did, they said yes. After a phone call, and some research looking for scam reports, looking for anything negative about them, checking the Georgia business directory (
https://ecorp.sos.ga.gov/BusinessSearch/BusinessInformation?businessId=1641205&businessType=Domestic%20Limited%20Liability%20Company&fromSearch=Trueusing company number 11053729 ) I went ahead and placed an order for an Antminer S19 Pro.
The price was reasonable for a machine at the time, nothing out of the ordinary (at $12,500), it was using coinbase commerce for its checkout.
I then got the normal woocommerce emails, saying order received, and then a couple of days later got an order complete notice. I was then sent a tracking number from (what transpires to be a fake) shipping company WagoShipping.com showing it had been picked up.
The a couple of days later is when I 100% knew I had been scammed. I got asked to pay another 10% for a "97% REFUNDABLE INSURANCE LICENSE". Which from research is a known scam, often used with people buying weed or whatever online that doesn't exist.
The email had all the hallmarks, badly written, typos, high pressure. Pay within 6 hours or the product (and there's nothing illegal about a crypto miner in Ireland where it was being shipped to) will be turned over to customs. I contacted them, said turn it over to customs so, and nothing since.
This is the first time in 7 years I've been scammed in crypto. On first review, things passed my checks. I checked the person saying they worked with the company, the company said they did. I checked for scam reports, there were none. I checked the company registration details, they came up legit.
But it isn't, hence this post. What's happened since is it's been reported to the police, but as it's outside of the EU so they can't do anything about it. When I went into the detail, checking domain names, it was only registered a few months ago, and most of the activity in terms of blog posts they're doing in are all in the last few months. Also, they changed the address of the business on the website straight away after scamming me, keeping it within Georgia but moving it to another location.
So as I said, I'm not looking for sympathy in this post. I've been scammed out of $12,500 which is painful, but I want to make sure that anyone who is looking at buying from this fake website has a chance to see a scam alert about them, and avoid giving them even more.
Edit: There's a UK site run by the same organization.
https://productadvanceelectroltd.com/ Product Advance Electro Ltd.
