Fraud warning for UK resellers

Watch out, watch out there's a scammer about...

By John Oates • Get more from this author

Posted in IT Channel, 7th October 2004 13:56 GMT

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A scammer is attempting to defraud UK resellers by passing themselves off as Nascent Technologies. The firm is warning that it has been contacted by several people who received orders apparently from Nascent Technologies and were about to send out kit. The police have been informed and are investigating.

The faxed order form appears to come from Nascent Technologies Ltd but has a London address. Nascent operates in several countries but has only one UK office in Harlow, Essex.

A Register reader contacted us to warn of the scam. He was called last week by someone asking for a price for Pentium 4 chips. He was then faxed an order appearing to come from Nascent. But our reader was suspicious and Googled the firm. He then phoned Nascent to confirm the order and was told it was not from them.

Such scams are not uncommon but usually only last a couple of weeks. A source at Nascent told us: "We've heard this from a few people since the begining of July - they even tried to order kit from our subsidiary company DSL-Warehouse. We are thinking of trading under a different name to put a stop to it. But we have only heard of one person who has actually lost kit due to this fraud." ®