Was the victim of one of these years ago, and another came through my door last week. Basically, a leaflet offers mobile phones, digital cameras and DVD players for silly prices at a sale in some nearby venue. When you turn up with a bunch of other people, instead of just picking stuff up and paying for it, you find this guy doing his spiel, 'selling' a few items like Gameboy Advances to certain 'customers', to encourage people's greed. Then he asks who will trust him with a fiver for what he's thinking of... It all leads to him conning hundreds of pounds out of people for cheap rubbish. Even I, with prior experience, surrendered an initial fiver, and got a bottle of (probably fake) perfume for my trouble.

What amazes me, though, is that this scam has been going on for years, evidently, but an extensive Google suggests that no-one ever complains. Certainly, I was the only one there asking where the '£4.99 VCR' was, or why I couldn't buy an MP3 player by itself, and not with a digital camera for £50 (the bundle was worth £30, max).

So I'm thinking, it's time people started trying to track these shysters on a national level, and put the Trading Standards people on their trail. After all, assuming that I wasn't the only genuine customer there, other people were spending money they could ill afford to spare, on a the strength of a perceived bargain, as my wife pleaded with me to cough up the money that first time.

To stop this fraud, therefore, I'm asking that if you've received a similar leaflet in the past six months, you relate the location and approximate date of the sale, and any other details you can remember, so we can build up a picture of how they operate. Or you could just write to the Advertising Standards Authority, or your local councillor.

Either way, I would get great satisfaction out of knobbling, or even just hobbling, these crooks. How about you?

Edited for typos, and because one bit looked a tad pushy

(Edited by The_Host 03/04/2006 04:39)