Warning for Nordic buyers!

[plasticman]

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Just a quick warning about the Eniro website that operates in the Nordic countries.

 

I was looking at a few Leica ads, all of which seemed suspiciously underpriced (but not so much as to be spectacularly 'too-good-to-be-true'), and decided out of curiosity to send a few messages of interest. Because the communication is handled through an Eniro formula, I naively believed that my email address and identity would be protected until the buyer and seller had at least agreed to meet (which was my suggestion in each case).

 

In fact, the 'seller' is directly given all your private details.

 

Naturally, every single one of the ads was a complete and very obvious fraud, which should have been filtered directly. Other sites in the Nordic countries - such as Blocket for instance - seem to have no trouble filtering away these fraudulent ads within a few hours, but Eniro had left these ads online for days or even weeks.

 

I reported the frauds, but obviously the damage is done as far as letting crooks know who you are. A very poor practice, in my opinion. So my advice is avoid Eniro entirely.

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[matlep]

Thanks for the heads up!

 

When you say the advertiser gets all your private details, what exactly do you mean by that? Curious, i answered an ad for a used M6 on Eniro, but no reply. Could it be the same advertiser?

 

//Mattias

[plasticman]

Hi Mattias

 

Just a bit of background (to clarify why I was so stupid and make myself appear less dumb) I've actually helped build sites myself where people can communicate with each other anonymously until both sides are satisfied that the other is trustworthy. This is actually really easy to do, and I fully assumed that Eniro (one of Sweden's biggest sites) would implement such a service. Therefore I used a mail address that includes my full name.

 

As you know, if you have someone's full name in Sweden (especially an unusual one, like mine) then you can find out where they live (on Eniro's own site, ironically enough - or Hitta.se) and many other details about them which I'd rather were not freely available to just anyone.

 

I'm really annoyed at how amateurishly the Eniro site is run - for instance, the most basic security measure a site should always take against fraud is not allowing registration from an 'anonymous' email service such as hotmail/live. This can be tough on young kids who have no options, but even simple opinion forums often block these servers, because of the trouble they cause. All of the emails used by the fraudulent ads were hotmail/live addresses.

 

In other words, Eniro appears not to safeguard buyers in even the most basic way. So my very strong advice is stay well away from Eniro altogether, and naturally use caution with all of the buy-sell sites.