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Report: #1169547

Complaint Review: Premier Depot - Internet

  • Submitted:
  • Updated:
  • Reported By: WC — Quebec
  • Author Not Confirmed What's this?
  • Why?
  • Premier Depot Internet USA

Premier Depot premierdepot.com is a very elaborate scam. DON'T TRUST THEM! Internet

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Quick summary up front, for those who don't want the full details:

Premierdepot.com claims to be an online escrow service. They take care of payment online (sorta like paypal). They have legitimate-looking websites, and even populate fake reviews. The fake-seller usually sells RVs, Campers, Trucks, or Cars. They then ask you to use premierdepot.com as the payment service. They ask for bank wire transfers. Then you get scammed and lose your money.

 

Details

To start off with, these guys are VERY elaborate in their scam. I'm in my 30's, generally a careful online shopper, very tech savvy, used to work for major tech company, and they totally got me. So please, take a read through.

My parents were looking to buy an RV. They asked me to look at premierdepot.com, to see if the site is legitimate. These guys claim to be an escrow company, where they help buyers and sellers complete their transaction. Why not paypal? Well, premierdepot.com claims that they deal with the shipping, moneyback guarantee, and their service protects both parties.

So, to do my research on these guys, I did the following:

Seller: Looked at the correspondence between seller and my parents. The seller went through kijiji (fine, no problems). The pictures were not obviously fake. The e-mail had very proper English. That seems well enough.

Reviews on premierdepot.com: This is where the scam is at its most elaborate. For big purchases, I always look for scam reports. I googled "premierdepot.com review". Pages upon pages of reviews came back. Now, the reviews aren't simple ones like "They are good. Trust them." kind of things. These were forums, review sites, with lengthy posts and replies. There would be posts from other people asking if they are legitimate, and other users would go into reasonable experiences with them. Some would even say things like "don't trust people who ask for Moneygram or Western Union" in their post, and talk about those things. Again, the forums had full threads on premierdepot.com

I don't recall seeing negative reviews. I have seen some (fake)reviews like "There are people who use premierdepot.com who are scammers, but premierdepot.com worked well." Basically, they do a great job preying on our trust in reviews, and do an amazing job leading our research on them to look legitimate.

Basically, I trusted them, told my parents it's okay, and they ended up losing $9000.

Now, the scammers took down premierdepot.com. Apparently they cycle through a few different names. Also, they took down all their fake reviews. It is only now that I see real reviews about them. Before, I only saw pages of (fake) Google results that make it look like they were real.

 

A few other reviews on them:

http://72.32.70.198/Scam/premierdepotscam.html

http://www.ripoffreport.com/r/premierdepotcom/internet/premierdepotcom-Premier-depot-is-a-Scam-Orlando-Internet-1168725 

 

Signs, in retrospect

Key things that, in retrospect, should be tip-offs, or things to check the next time:

1) The (fake)review sites. I didn't look at the urls of the review sites carefully. I assumed the review sites and forums themselves are legitimate. Looking at it now, the google cache for them had stuff like. [somereviewsite].com.co, or other stuff like that. But I didn't even consider they would set up 50+ (fake)review sites and flood google results with them.

2) Bank wire transfer. It's my first time using bank wiretransfer for a transaction. I've heard bad things about people who use MoneyGram or Western Union (they even had (fake)reviews that say so), so using bank wiretransfer didn't seem unreasonable. 

3) Internet Escrow companies: Well, don't trust them, it seems. 

4) Trace their IP: Reading other actual scam reports on these guys, they took the time to trace premierdepot.com's IP, which showed: Romania/Austria/Russia, or some University. 

5) Get better proof: Perhaps I needed to ask them to take a picture with the RV, with them holding today's date, and the title/deed beside it. 

 

Hope this will reduce the number of people getting scammed from them!

 

This report was posted on Ripoff Report on 08/13/2014 11:51 AM and is a permanent record located here: https://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/premier-depot/internet/premier-depot-premierdepotcom-is-a-very-elaborate-scam-dont-trust-them-internet-1169547. The posting time indicated is Arizona local time. Arizona does not observe daylight savings so the post time may be Mountain or Pacific depending on the time of year. Ripoff Report has an exclusive license to this report. It may not be copied without the written permission of Ripoff Report. READ: Foreign websites steal our content

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