It appears I’ve stumbled into something far bigger than I was expecting when I first saw the forum post from “The Bike Shop Ltd”. At the time I thought it was possibly an isolated case, but today another post on a different forum caught my eye. This posting (now unfortunately deleted by the forum administrators) looked suspiciously like another one I was familiar with in terms of the layout, the dodgy English, and the touting of “credentials” (although the prices here included an $8000 Kona Four Lisa, which seems a touch excessive). I really don’t spend all my time cruising forums but have found myself in some decidedly odd areas of the internet in the last few hours.
I went back to the original posting and did a bit of digging around. Quickly I came across a number of other posts, all looking very similar and selling a range of goods, although mostly either bikes or electrical goods and mobile phones. For example, this one, selling cheap mobiles. You can find a load for yourself by Googling their usual opening gambit, which seems to be “To sell....”, on various forums including Stephen Fry’s blog and a number of other forums across the internet world.
Having checked some of the details out in the same way as I did originally, it seems that whoever’s behind these posts works in a couple of ways, either registering a company with Companies House and using a residential address, or using the address for an existing company, and using their details. The most audacious case of this was using the details for Dial-a-Phone, a trading name of High-Street company Phones4U.
It seems that this might beyond my scope to address, without some crack team of computer sleuths and rapid response units. The best I could muster would be two and a half people on bicycles, and anyone would be long gone by the time we made it.
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