You’ve just received an email advertising a two-year-old press at an unbelievable price. According to the message, other companies are interested, but all it takes to secure this bargain of a lifetime is payment of a 10% deposit. What would you do? If you chose to ignore it, there’s a chance that your rival down the road could snap it up and gain an advantage. However, if you answer it, you could end up around £20,000 out of pocket C almost the cost of a press minder’s wages for a year.

　　This is what happened when a police officer in Uxbridge got a phone call from a German company that had just lost £40,000. The company received an email from a dealer pretending to be operating from the UK and the email claimed that a Heidelberg press was on sale for well below the genuine market price. After building up an online relationship, the German company agree to send a 10% deposit to secure the press. Only the company offering the press didn’t exist. Although the money was eventually traced back to Holland, the perpetrators could not be located. Their bank account had been closed down and their telephone number was merely a paid-for subscription number C they could have been operating anywhere apart from the UK.

　　Fashion for fraud

　　This sort of scam is affecting more and more UK dealers and printers, many of whom are so embarrassed of having been conned in the first place that they fail to report it to the police. Online fraud is a major growth area for criminals with the most recent figures provided by APACS C the UK payments association Cshowing that card fraud over the internet costs the UK £117m and, according to the Home Office, internet financial fraud amounts to £121m.

　　Printing press fraud accounts for a very small amount of that overall figure, but for those affected, the results can be damaging. The problem with the ‘advance fee’ scam, which is around two to three years old, is that it is very difficult to catch the perpetrators who, in the main, operate outside the UK. However, there are ways that you can reduce your exposure in the first place, the most important safety net being the ability to spot whether something is genuine or fraudulent from the off.

　　The scam works in three different ways. The first and possibly the oldest is when the fraudsters offer an expensive used printing machine for sale C often a Heidelberg press or a similar make that tends to retain its value C they put a price tag on it that’s too good to be true, and ask for a 10% deposit prior to viewing. The second affects a dealer selling a machine. In this case, the transaction takes place, a bankers’ draft is sent to the dealer and he loads the lorry up with the machine.

　　The machine is sent to a UK forwarding agent, and is then transferred to a depot and collected. By the time the dealer has been contacted by the bank and told the bankers draft is fraudulent, it is too late: he has lost his machine with no hope of tracing it. The latest version of the scam is the overpayment fraud, where the fraudster sends a bankers’ draft and overpays for a piece of equipment by around