Facebook Scam
Original Post#
So, a family member wants to buy a 40’ shipping container and found a listing on FB for Aris Smart Shipping Containers. The website on the FB account goes no where, there are no likes, no followers, and no reviews. The seller is in WA, I are located in the Midwest. They claim that all of their drivers are in WA, and are able to ship a 40’ container from WA to the MW, for roughly the cost of a 20’ container locally ($2500). I tried to do a reverse search on the cell number, its apparently owned by Onvoy Limited. Which from what I can tell is a scam/spam, VoIP service. Is there any other ways to get info on this possible scam?
My Response#
The first thing is that photos are all stolen from Facebook. The men in profile pic work for a legit New Zealand company called Royal Wolf.
Their only positive review is from a person who’s facebook profile is minimal and who’s received a lot of crap from people for liking them.
Their website domain was bought 3 months ago. The server is not configured correctly and is currently down. The IP address is being used to host tens (maybe hundreds) of other websites.
The email address that they provide is only used on their website and nowhere else.
Googleing the phone number reveals a second nearly identical profile for Shipping Containers Available Sales & Rentage based out of Cleveland with the exact same phone number. There’s also a second phone number in the old posts (440) 926-6908. If you google that one, they are also selling exotic pets with the same kind of facebook post. That number is a burner text number from a company called “textnow”
Here are my thoughts: I’m not an OSINT analyst, just a newbie who is learning OSINT. I’m sure a real analyst can squeeze a lot more. I feel confident that these people are scammers. However, I haven’t found any personally identifiable info and I’m not going to spend money on this for a person-lookup service. I think the best thing to do right now is to do as much research as you can on their group of facebook profiles and report them all as scammers. They seems lazy and will be back with the same scams later, but unless there is hard proof as to who these people are, I wouldn’t go much farther than that.
One more thing… If you WANT to go farther, start investigating the friends of the lady who gave Aris Smart Shipping Containers their only positive review. She seems sketchy and since she has (possibly) real people in her friends list, that might be a lead…. oh and she’s only ever liked one other facebook page. It’s for exotic kittens and they have the same (440) 926-6908 phone number as above.
You can find the original post here and my comments here. (I still don’t know why they deleted the original post, but thank God for archive.org!)
My research#
The first thing that I did was research “Aris Smart Shipping Containers” on Facebook and I found this page.
The circled area are things that I looked at first.
Brave is my main browser of choice. I used the Search by Image extension to start taking a look at some of the images. The picture that I circled with the two men led me to this page for Royal Wolf, and company that makes shipping containers based out of New Zealand. That was the first major tip off that this Facebook page is a scam since they were stealing images from other companies, but I wanted to find something more. How did I know that Aris doesn’t have some kind of legitimate reason for having these images on their Facebook page?
Previously, there was one like and positive review for Aris on Facebook. That review and like are gone now. I would not be surprised if the entire Facebook profile had been deleted. I did not record a screenshot of that page at the time, I’ll just leave it at that.
The next thing to look at is the telephone number. Using Michael Bazzell’s OSINT tools, I confirmed that the number, “+1 206-837-8761” is a VoIP number from a company called, “Onvoy Spectrum”. I couldn’t find anything specific about this number from the OSINT tools specifically, but when I googled the number, I found something big.
It appears that Aris has a twin, Shipping Containers Available Sales & Rentage! This page has the exact same layout and even a few of the same images. Not to mention, the same telephone number, “+1 206-837-8761”. I think the odds are very good at these two pages are made by the same person/group of people.
Notice that this page has been up for a lot longer than the one for Aris. If you scroll down, you can also see that there is yet another telephone number listed for them, “+1(440)-926-6908”.
When I researched the second number it brought me to yet another Facebook page that was created at about the same time as the previous one. It also has the same phone number. This time, they are selling mini pigs. Again, I see the same pattern. No reviews and more stolen images.
What’s next?#
If this were a real investigation, I think the next step would be to do some paid search on the phone numbers and hopefully attach a real name to them. I don’t think that’s likely though. This scam is pretty simple. Offer things at an unbelievable price and then never deliver. Delete the account and start again with a new name. I didn’t bother searching the email addresses because they are all pretty generic gmail accounts. I didn’t expect to find anything there.
Conclusion#
At this point, I think it’s pretty obvious that I’ve made it pretty clear that this is a scammer who has multiple Facebook pages but with a limited number of phone numbers that they are willing to use. I don’t have enough information to see who is this scammer, where they are located, etc. I don’t really have to either. This original question was, “Is there any other ways to get info on this possible scam?”. I think the answer is very likely, a yes this is a scam.
It’s been a few weeks since I wrote my original reply and I didn’t keep my notes. It was only just recently that I thought about documenting my answer.
In the future, I will take the time to document the entire process and post them with my finding when possible.