Your only hope of recovering any money is by making a chargeback to your credit card through your bank stating the goods that were promised were not received. These would be the promises of your account manager of wining trades and also the ability to withdraw your funds any time, both of which were untrue. You therefore deposited money in good faith, but were lied to so they could get your money from you.
Sign nothing from them and report this scam to your national fraud office and get a reference number. Quote this number when making your chargeback claim to your bank. It's going to be a long process but you must be persistent and don't take no for an answer from the bank. Visa are well aware that this fraud is happening and they also know most of the operators, so if they decline your chargeback request they could be seen as complicit in the scam themselves. I hope you have some success, good luck.
Oh yes and my vote is GUILTY!!
Hi all.
Whilst aware of this case having been closed, I feel I have to make a couple of comments.
After reading the details the first time (before it closed; although I never got around to voting due to some unforeseen circumstances) I straight away knew that Athula stood no chance at all with it! Why? Well, he's in the same country in which I operated a bank account, from which I was scammed by Optionstars global (I have posted extensively about this on this site).There, the banks ARE LEAST bothered about chasing up on scammers if you chose to report to them! In fact they are more prone to be in the category of your comment that I have underlined above.
Which is why it increasingly baffles me why you and AsstModerator keep giving advise for people to do a charge back! Is there a place that they actually work?
I recall somebody claiming on this forum, how they had received their full refund and some. But after what I went through with the bank, I remained very skeptical of that claim! As you saw on one of Athula's statements, the bank straight off dismissed him when he approached them for help!
Again, I can't recall whether ti was you who advised us victims, to write to any authorities, publications and whoever else we imagined could listen, and put pressure on these scammers in effort to get our money back. Sadly, that too turns out to be an unlit street, with a possible dead end! Having attempted to engage a reputed scribe in Norway(the master scammer for my case was operating from there),completed the iC3, and directly engaging Reuters.This latter in efforts to establish what relationship there is with OSG, as their logo appears on it's website's home page. Not a word from all those, even as an acknowledgement! (However, I am now unable to establish whether the Reuters status still prevails, as the OS website appears to have disappeared after mid last month. Were they finally brought down, or is it that they have blocked me? Who knows?!). Or even having dived under, to reincarnate at some point in time!
So any which way, Athula was never going to obtain any recourse in the land he's residing. In fact, having an idea of what goes on there, i'd say he's in a pretty much precarious situation.
