tom heath scammer update

[hammerhead]

just seen this on another forum might be of intrest


Just a heads up on this TOM HEATH fella, if it is the same person hes actually been arrested and charged over his scamming antics and has bee given a£3750 fine and 80 hours community service........check out the post from another forum !!!

Back in 2001, the forum was just starting out. The members mainly were customers of the EDITED SITE NAME, and had a real interest and passion for the hobby. As the forum had aimed to be a community to bring together enthusiasts of RC cars, there was a sense of friendship and people didn't mind helping out others with advice, knowledge or even free parts.

As the forum grew, our membership shot up as the reputation the EDITED SITE NAME forum built became known as THE place to go if you wanted to find something out about your RC car. However, with this increase in forum traffic, naturally, it brought an element of life that we never like to see - the scammer trying to make quick cash. Case in point, was 2007, a young man who decided that our 13,000 members were a prime target to make money. Due to the legal/court involvement on our part, we cannot use his real name or identify the member, so we'll refer to him as "Tom".

Now, the easiest way to scam someone is to sell something you don't actually have. So, Tom realized that he could do his deed by jumping on the idea of the most popular RC car of recent times, a HoBao Hyper 7. He spent around....oooooh....10secs on Google images to find some pics of a Hyper 7 in decent condition, and then listed it for sale on the forum. He threw together a vague description and story about how he'd bought it, loved it, took care of it, but as times were tough, it needed to be sold, and he was asking a mere £140 for it, ready to run. The two important points he listed though, were PayPal only, and Post only, no collection. PayPal because it is a common and quick way of transferring money. Post only, to stop unwanted (angry) people at his door.

In 2007, £140 for a fairly mint Hyper 7 would have been an utter bargain, so it was no surprise that after 20 or so minutes, Tom had 4 forum members all offering the asking price plus another £10 for postage. He sent details of his payment address, and within half an hour of joining EDITED SITE NAME, he'd grabbed £600. Within a day, he had more offers close to the asking price, and by the weekend, Tom had gained £1500. Of course, he had no intention of sending the car, because it didn't exist...

After a couple of weeks without anything being delivered, the full scale of the situation became apparent. The forum members who had sent Tom money were starting to get anxious and posted questions on the thread. "Where's my car?"...."I paid for next day delivery for this!"...."You bought it too?"...."Yeah, did you?"..."I bought it too, I think we've been done". Tom was ignoring all methods of contact and after closing his PayPal account he was proving to be untraceable. Then, someone did the best thing they could have done in that situation - they pressed the 'Report' button.

Automatically, all forum staff were sent an email saying that there was a problem with the member, and that we should look into it. When we spoke to those involved, we saw that there was a serious problem and it needed investigating. After some looking through the forum database, we found Tom's other usernames, IP address (which was a proxy server) and email address. With the aid of various websites (that we also can't reveal because of ongoing investigations with subsequent cases), and the details he himself provided to those he scammed, we found Tom's real name, date of birth, home address and landline number. Despite the appeal of going in person to retrieve the money, we got in touch with the Police and passed all his details on (along with printouts of the thread), who were surprised at the amount of evidence and information we could gain on him, fairly easily.

The Police took our information and found that he'd been scamming on other forums too, and later we found that Tom had been arrested for fraud and theft through deception. He was fined the maximum allowed by law, which was £3,750, and was ordered to do 80 hours community service.

A big thank-you to everyone involved. It took some time but we got there in the end and we are doing the exact same to all those other scammers we've had through out the last year!

[gaza121]

That little sod tried to scam me when I posted a welder wanted add on here, quickly twigged it was Tom H so posted his facebook page and details from other sites he was scamming.

Pity they could not do him for more as I guess he has stolen 10 times that ammount!!!.

Good work Hammerhead

[bodgit]

Great work. Maybe this could be a sticky on the for sale section to warn other scammers that they will be caught and dealt with.

[carpenterdean]

Personally i think the PR$CK deserves a bit of street justice!!