I am searching to buy a good digital camera.. After all my research I
found the site www.newcamerashop.com.. The deal for the Nikon D70 is
incredible but there is no phone number.. I am really sceptical at
this point and am not sure I want to dish out $900 to an unknown scam
site..

Dear oxfordt9,

Don't buy anything from NewCameraShop - they are without any doubt a scam.

One of the most common characteristics of scam companies are fake
addresses. So I checked the alleged address they provide on their
website: Lapinrinne 25, FIN-00100 Helsinki, Finland.
This address is nothing but clumsy bogus. While there is a street
named Lapinrinne in the Finnish capital Helsinki, it is a very short
street - there is no number 25. The highest house number in Lapinrinne
is No.6.

Scam evidence 1: No reputable company uses a bogus address on their website.


I also checked who the registered owner of the "company" domain
newcamerashop.com is. Allegedly, this is their address:

David Brinkman
New Camera Shop
Fridtjof Nansens plass 17
0160
Oslo
Norway
Phone: +1.2072624501

Again, this is a bogus address. I checked it and found out, not to my
surprise, that the highest house number of Fridtjof Nansens Plass in
Oslo is No.9. A house with the number 17 simply does not exist there.
The phone number, by the way, is not Norwegian at all. It's an
unlisted American number, from Maine.

Scam evidence 2: Reputable companies do not use bogus addresses for
registering their Web domains. Scammers do, because they don't want to
be tracked by their victims.


The registration record also claims that the original registrant of
the domain was one David Brinkman from Windham, Maine. But I think
that this person's name, address and phone number have been used
without his knowledge, in a case of identity theft. Only 27 days after
the domain was registered by pseudo-Brinkman on 3 Dec 2004, it was
transferred to pseudo-Brinkman #2 who obviously moved to a
non-existent address in Oslo.


Finally, two targeted Google searches reveal other person's warnings
concerning NewCameraShop:

newcamerashop fraud
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=newcamerashop+fraud

newcamerashop scam
://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=newcamerashop+scam


So my advice is clear: Don't deal with NewCameraShop. They are scammers.


Regards,
Scriptor




Sources:

Helsinki City Map
http://kartta.hel.fi/opas/en/

Aftenposten: Norwegian Address Search
http://tux2.aftenposten.no/kart/

Gandi.net Domain Whois
http://www.gandi.net/whois?l=EN

Switchboard Telephone Directory
htp://www.switchboard.com/

Hi Oxfordt9:

What caused you to suspect that the site was a scam?

When I looked at the site, the first thing that I noticed was that it
looked "cheesey" and not very well developed. Upon looking at some of
the categories I noticed that they only offered one item within the
category. Again, this doesn't look "right."

Hello,

A big tipoff is that the only method of payment they accept is
"Western Union Money Transfer".  Hopefully that alone will keep too
many people from getting scammed.