ScamVictimsUnited.com

My husband and I are in the market for a motorhome and searched the web. We had bought and sold on Ebay before and had pleasant experiences there. My husband found a motorhome on a different website and contacted the owner. They discussed terms and came to an agreement on the selling price based on the description that the seller gave us. The seller wanted some money to "hold" the motorhome until we could go look at it, as we live in PA and he was in CT. We wanted to pay him with PayPal, but he indicated that his wife works at Wachovia Bank and he wanted a wire transfer. We had never wired any money before, but the woman basically talked us through the process and made us feel at ease in doing it. I guess since we've had good experiences before and his wife worked at a bank, we agreed and wired this guy $500. The next weekend, we drove 400 miles to CT, only to find "Cousin Eddies" motorhome from the movie Vacation. We, of course, told the guy we were not going to purchase the vehicle and he told my husband that he would have his wife call us the next day to have the money wired back. When we didn't get a call, my husband called him and left several messages. A couple days later, the seller answered the phone and told him we wouldn't be getting the money back because he had turned down other buyers holding it for us, and not to call him again or he'd file harrassment charges against us. There was never any discussion about if he was lying about the condition, what would happen to the money.

We feel that we would never have wired the money, but for the fact that she worked at a bank and talked us into it. They used her position at the bank to get us to trust them.

Do we have any recourse now to get this money back? Are bank employees allowed to first of all conduct personal business like that, and are they allowed to use the fact that they work at a bank to get people to wire money. Since there was no written agreements about what would happen to the money, are they just allowed to keep it now? We never agreed to allow them to keep it and would never have agreed to that having never even seen the motorhome in person. The pictures he put on the website must have been old pictures and he said all it needed was washed. Rust does not wash off!

What do we do now?

I would find a lawyer, or even look at taking them to small claims court . . . you had a verbal agreement with them, that is an unwritten contract. The money was to hold the item, and if they really had other people who wanted it they would be able to return your money and then contact these other people and sell the item to them.