A sophisticated and organised fraud which made use of the eBay auction site and the Royal Mail Special Delivery site.
Items of value (usually laptops and camcorders) were offered for sale on the eBay auction website.
Purchasers of those items were persuaded not to use the secure payment facility utilised by eBay (PayPal) but instead to transfer funds directly to a bank account operated by the defendants. No items were received by the purchasers because there were no items to sell. The defendants utilised a sound working knowledge of the Royal Mail Special Delivery system (one of the defendants a Royal Mail employee) in order to ensure that whilst the purchasers received a special delivery number, no parcel ever matched that number. In some cases, the Royal Mail paid compensation in respect of the 'lost' item; in others, the purchaser bore the loss.
Karen Robinson