Hi, i almost got scammed too. I think it is important to share this to everyone here. This con-man has wasted whole of my Saturday arranging flights and payments. Got me excited over the super deal i thought I've got.
Today his name is James Morgan Catterall from Auckland and residing in HongKong Repulse Bay. He even sent me his HK NRIC with KrisFlyer account displaying he has 494k KF miles and his wife Olivia Catterrall has 244k miles for sale. Both are PPS Solitaire club.
He uses a SG line despite residing in HK his SG line is ****************. His asking price was $10 for 1k worth of miles, this is freaking cheap! He later offered to give me discount at $7/1k miles, which later he discounted to $6/1k miles, i did not even negotiate for any discount as i find it already super cheap.
He seem to be super familiar with the miles systems work across all different Miles companies like Marco Polo, KF etc. and even booking of the flights, looks like a professional in this area.
We communicated through WhatsApp the whole time. He said he will only book the flights after I've made the payment. Which i thought is he's just being careful. Fair enough. Later I did explained to him that, he can proceed to book the flight for me and i will concurrently do a TT to his HK account (he provided me with a HongKong HSBC account!), i will furnish him with a TT slip which will confirms the payment. He said he can only book after the TT went through, and it is very troublesome to do a TT. I assured him that the payment will be in after he book the tickets for me, if i don't honour the payment, he could cancel my tickets. Points will be credited back to him at a small nominal fee. He has nothing much to lose since i spent whole afternoon in coordinating the flights,
Later, He asked if I've got any friends in HK able to meet him to pass him the cash, I did not want to trouble my friend so i proposed my friend to do online trsf to his account which is instant. He then suggested me to pay through bitcoin! Which is even more troublesome but he assured me that its simple and fast. Took me more than 1 hour to set up bitcoin account and to communicate with the traders there. He seemed super familiar with bitcoin functionality. He even asked me to lie to the trader in order to get the stocks. I find it weird and uncomfortable. The traders are secretive and keep asking me how did i know them?
Bitcoin purchase requires me to use DBS to do a internet banking payment to trader's DBS account. Which will later be used to purchase bitcoin and trsf to this Con-man.
Finally, I'm at the payment page ready t pay S$2700, i felt kinda uneasy. So i raised this whole matter to my brother. Thank god, he's such a sharp chap. He uses his phone to call this con-man and guess that, it is LOCAL TONE!!!! He is not in HK!!!!!!!
We did some search online using his mobile no and ended up here in this forum and many other forums! So many people got conned and i was almost one of them!
I must say he's a professional con-man! However a PPS Solitaire club holder will not waste time to sell miles the whole day for that little money! I hope no one else gets cheated. I chance upon him through carousel which i will report this up to Carousel too!