Imagine random people started arriving at your front door, day and night, expecting to pick up a product they’d paid a deposit for and then expressing various levels of aggravation when they learnt you didn’t have the item expected. That’s what is happening to one Shepparton family.
The family would like to remain anonymous to protect themselves from further unwanted attention, but the father, who we’ll call John, said they had fallen victim to a scammer who apparently randomly picked their address in order to carry out their scam.
“We’ve had close to 35 people turn up, and it’s always been a combination of either an iPhone or a tablet,” John said.
“We’ve had scenarios where it’s been 10 o’clock on a Tuesday night, I hear a car rumbling outside, two doors close, and you’re in bed.
“So you get up, walk out, and there’s two phone flashlights lighting up the footpath from the gate, and they’re walking up towards the door, and I’m standing there and go to approach them and say, ‘What are you doing?’”
John said people reacted in various ways when they learnt there was no product to pick up, especially after some had travelled from as far away as Bendigo or even Dandenong.
“We’ve had some very hostile people that were (very upset) to hear that news,” John said.
“We’ve been fortunate in the sense of people’s reactions so far, but there is that one per cent, someone who’s just having a very bad day, and it’s just the final straw that breaks the camel’s back, and I don’t want to impose that risk on my family.”
The scammer advertises a product on Facebook, usually an iPhone, at a drastically reduced price and then asks prospective buyers to pay a deposit before telling them they can pick it up from the Shepparton address of the family.
John has reported the issue to police but has been frustrated by their response.
Police have told him they “fully understand the emotional impact” on his family, but because he had not been scammed by the alleged party, he was not a direct victim.
Instead, he was advised to encourage the direct victims of the scam to lodge a police report so an investigation could be pursued.
In the meantime, John has been carrying out his own investigation and said he’d established that the scammer was a man living in Sydney, along with a range of other information he had passed on to police.
He also found it difficult to contact Facebook to report the issue, but after The News began making inquiries, he was contacted by a representative of Meta, the company that owns Facebook.
Ironically, the Facebook representative’s email arrived in John’s email inbox moments after he’d just answered the door to another scam victim expecting to pick up a phone.
“We’ve put a video camera that can record sound and visual as well, night and day, we’ve put that out the front as a form of reassurance and a bit of deterrence as well,” John said.
Now, he can only hope Meta, and the scam victims, can do their part in bringing an end to his family’s torment, and they can once again return to their quiet lives in Shepparton.