Malaysia Furniture Import Scam?

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Hello I'm New here! Joined: 16 Apr 2015 Posts: 1

Advice please:

My husband, naive and trusting as he is, picked up a 'friend' who is obviously a scammer. Once he realized we have money enough to relocate to Costa Rica later in the year he's started hounding my husband to go into business with him. First it was he wanted us to put up all the funds for him to build houses and then we would split the profit 50/50, then it was building rental house before he moved onto wanting to buy used cars with our money, then he fix the cars up and resell them. All bad ideas that my husband knows nothing about.

Now Mr. Scammer has lost his construction manager job in the USA and has moved back to his wife in Malaysia. Every single day since he moved he's been skyping with my husband and insisting my husband go into business with him importing fancy Malaysia furniture into the US. He hasn't asked for money this go round yet, but he's demanding my husband do this with him. Mr. Scammer calls him tonight, in the middle of our first property buying trip to Costa Rica and starts pressuring him to start contacting furniture retailers to order this furniture and a couple of huge red flags go up:

1 - Mr. Scammer says that his name cannot go anywhere on the business because he owes money to various people on some other 'big business' deal he's done.
2 - Mr. Scammer says that we have to provide the furniture factory with our banking account info and routing numbers to get paid.

See where I'm going with this?

I flipped out on him, telling the scammer that I have some knowledge/experience with scammers and would never agree to provide banking info for wire transfers to anyone. (years ago I did scam baiting)

Here's my question. Has anyone here heard of someone running a scam like this, selling products to be imported then insisting everything be done by wire transfer? Is this how furniture factories in the far East operate? Am I being unduly suspicious?

I cannot find a trace of this guy online. He only lived and worked in our town for the three months we knew him. He left under bad circumstances. He used to own and operate a Russian dating service, claims to have built homes for millionaires in Malaysia and to have all sorts of business connections. This guy is ringing all my Lost In Space robot alarms.

Posted: Thu Apr 16, 2015 5:05 am

Hi OneAngryWoman, welcome to Eater.

This is a bit different to the normal scams we deal with, as the guy actually exists and appears to be using his real details, but it still stinks of scam and the guy is obvioulsy dodgy.

Any legitimate business would be offering credit card facilities for customers to pay and if they did offer bank transfer for customers who couldn't/wouldn't pay by card then they would receive the payments directly to their own bank account. No company would ever ask an individual to receive the money in their personal account and then forward it on.

2 possibilities spring to mind - either the furniture business will take the money and not deliver or the whole thing could just be a front to get you to recieve money from victims of other scams. Either way, when the shit hits the fan, it will be you and your husband that the authorities investigate and possibly charge with fraud or money laundering.

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