How to get back at a scammer

Q. I have been stupid and trusted a stranger from the UK who I thought wanted to buy my 2008 Kawasaki ZX-10R from me here in Slovakia. I won’t go into details, but I lost a lot of money and I don’t know what to do next.
Marek, Bratislava, Slovakia

A. I’m sorry to hear you have had such a nightmare time. These scammers prey on honest bikers all the time, building up a false sense of trust using networks of spoof sites and fake money transfer forms.

Although it’s little comfort to you, you can read through a web-site called: www.419eater.com and then try a bait of your own to try and arrange a real meeting with these people…

As a consequence of the tide of scam e-mails that MCN advertisers have been subjected to recently we have introduced new, market-leading security measures.

They include:

1. All road-legal private bikes for sale are theft-checked for free, and details of the check are included in a freely downloadable buyer’s pack, containing useful buying advice, unique to each bike.

2. All adverts submitted to MCN are manually reviewed, ensuring that few – if any – fake ads make it through to the site.

3. All responses sent to our advertisers are subjected to a three-stage scam filtering process, reinforced with manual monitoring. This means if you advertise your bike on MCN you will only get genuine responses. In December and January, MCN blacklisted 300 scammers, and stopped 1000s of scam emails reaching sellers.

4. Sellers’ email addresses are never revealed, and temporary phone numbers are allocated for free – meaning you don’t even need to publish you own phone number.
For more details on how to avoid these scum, and get even with them, just type “scammers” into the search bar on the MCN web-site.