But the impunity with with scammers operate in South Africa, could not have been more clearly illustrated than the uncovering of kpvengineeringgroup.com.
This website redirects to http://randwater.co.za/Pages/Home.aspx, the legitimate Rand Water:
--- reading URL kpvengineeringgroup.comWhat this means, is that any visitor that tries to visit http://kpvengineeringgroup.com ends up at Rand Water's website.
--- contacting host kpvengineeringgroup.com [66.117.4.161] on port 80
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Wed, 03 Feb 2016 21:41:05 GMT
Server: Apache
Location: http://randwater.co.za/Pages/Home.aspx
Content-Length: 246
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>301 Moved Permanently</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Moved Permanently</h1>
<p>The document has moved <a href="http://randwater.co.za/Pages/Home.aspx">here</a>.</p>
</body></html>
--- connection closed
How ironic that Rand Water's homepage warns us of a supplies scam:
So what's going on here? Surely no scammer would redirect to a warning of a scam?
Exactly. Since we are thinking this, we are heading down the wrong rabbit hole. It's not uncommon to receive phishing emails with warnings to not click on links to your bank account. The same principle applies here.
A quick look at the other activities of kpvengineeringgroup.com shows they are merrily selling non-existent cutting blades. We find this telling advertisement on Gumtree:
Also another on Locanto:
Digging a bit deeper, we find only the index page is redirected to Rand Water. The actual scam website is intact and can be seen at http://www.kpvengineeringgroup.com/product.html, the scam website.
At this stage the more enthusiastic DIY'ers might say, but that's a Bosch blade! Correct. Here is how the unedited version of the product looks:
On a side note, to just illustrate how widely this scam has propagated; while researching some details, I happened to come across this:
No surprise that research shows that kpvengineeringgroup.com previously used fax no 0866011464 and is also associated with MANDLA METAL ENGINEERS (mandlametalengineers.co.za).
This leads to this Google+ profile, where the scammer is marketing "COLBAN-Q 275mm cutting discs", in reality Dronco cutting disks.
Buyer beware!
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