I was contacted by someone calling himself "Mr. Donnie" from a company ELVIN TRADING BV selling wholesale 3M respirator face masks at a very good price.
Elvin B.V. is a real company registered in the Netherlands. The fraudster stole their registration, name and location while creating an entire fake entity named Elvin Trading B.V./ Elvin Trading B.V. The website had product listings including 3M respirator masks and looked perfectly legit.
After giving me wholesale quotes, they sent me a pro-forma invoice, everything looked very professional. The only method of payment was bank wire which is not unusual with many overseas wholesalers.
The first sign of suspicion was that the bank was in Poland, but the website listed them as having a subsidiary in Poland. I went as far as doing the bank wire transfer but the bank returned it.
They still had me sucked in, and they said if I would do the transfer using MoneyGram that they would express ship the masks and I would have the masks in 2 days. They had me send the money to their "accountant" who was "on a business trip" in Spain. I foolishly continued with the scam, even though I surely know better, and I am very lucky I didn't lose the money because somehow the transaction was held up.
They kept bugging me to contact MoneyGram to free up the funds and at this point sounding desperate to get the funds I really got suspicious.
I then saw that the website was down and someone else had posted on a scam alert website that they got scammed. I immediately cancelled the payment with MoneyGram and reported the fraud to MoneyGram.
I am extremely lucky to have narrowly escaped getting scammed by these fraudsters. If anyone contacts you selling Respirator masks that sounds too good to be true, don't believe it. These people are taking advantage of the situation and it is despicable.
By the way, I know that face masks are banned on eBay right now so please don't discuss that here. I have other outlets where I had planned on selling them. I just wanted to warn people about this scam.
