Oh Dear. Was browsing facebook, and a an ad for pretty attractive deal for a $179 “household excavator” popped up.
Advertiser was “gaingrip.com” and it listed some suspicious looking site called psoyjv.com as the online store.. hmmm. is this legit? My suspicions were already aroused.
Wow. What a cheap deal…. bust be for a very cool electric and plastic kids toy at that price though, right?
It would make a great gift.. but something seemed slightly strange about it… not to mention a lot of the negative and derisive comments that had been posted on the ad. There was a lot of attention though- 800+ shares, and thousands of comments.
Couldn’t be any harm in looking anyway, right?
Of course, I was curious, so I clicked on it… took me to a fairy dodgy and poorly designed shopify “online store” called ntfdvd.com (see screenshot below for what I mean)
Looking more closely at the “Household Excavator” that was allegedly for sale, It became pretty clear that it was no toy, and showed pictures and videos of a very expensive Komatsu PC-01 Excavator.
Komatsu’s are very high quality, and very pricey pieces of professional construction equipment.
Not a chance in a million years one could be sold for a supposed RRP of $899, let alone the insane price of $179.00 USD, or AUD.
Most likely a massive SCAM. there were other products such as DeWalt lithium tool packs that are thousands in retail stores… also selling for, you guessed it; the magical price of $179.00
Checking on Alibaba, a Komatsu PC-01 mini excavator / shovel digger sells for a whopping$5,000 – $17,000.
https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/komatsu-pc01-excavator.html
And on Alibaba, the quality and creditworthiness other sellers may be questionable in the first place, so even those prices are probably cheap in comparison.
Absolutely no chance that this was some kind of Chinese import dumping or clearance. just too cheap.
The final nail in the coffin for this being a clear scam site was the FREE SHIPPING to Australia. Yep, casual free shipping for a 3 cubic meter excavator, weighing over 700Kg at a minimum.
That alone was worth thousands. SCAM SCAM SCAMMY SCAM.
Amazingly, people were falling for it. As I watched the site for a couple minutes, the inventory dropped 10 units as the site made sales to some poor hapless people.
I added the product to cart, and went though a checkout page, putting in garbage details- all seemed legit, with credit card payment channels, so I’m thinking that buyers were just optimistic that it was real, and prepared to launch a credit card chargeback if the seller failed to deliver… but we are most likely dealing with CRIMINALS here- so it’s a dangerous game thinking you can outsmart them at their own game.