CONSUMERS are hunting for the owners of Living Lifestyle Interiors (LLI) who apparently swindled them out of thousands of rand and then issued death threats when questioned why the furniture they had bought online had not been delivered.
This week none of the people involved in running the alleged scam could be reached because links and telephone numbers had been disabled while the message on its former website read “account suspended”.
“Importers of furniture, builders of relationships. From concept to completion it is our people’s passion for excellence that makes our brand unique.” reads one of the online links but once you click on it, “account suspended” appears.
Durban-based private investigator Brad Nathanson has been working on the case after a woman turned to him for help when the furniture company threatened her for asking when the furniture would arrive.
“It’s an absolute scam from beginning to end,” said Nathanson.
He said Living Lifestyle Furnitures was a fictitious company, and the name was put on a document provided by sellers when pressured by a client to provide proof of the company’s registration. In addition, the phone numbers linked to LLI were not registered.
“In our industry, we call these omniscient people strikers because they have nothing - no history, no credit history, they've got no criminal records, they're just people that give up their identities for a couple of hundred grand. The syndicates open up one bank account after another using their details.”
Nathanson said since posting details of the scam on Facebook he was contacted by seven people, all victims of the same scam.
He said they had all been threatened after posting negative reviews about the company on sites like Hello Peter.
“The father who phoned me … had been so traumatised by the things that they had threatened to do to his wife and children,” said Nathanson.
Victims told the Sunday Tribune they did not want to be named because they feared for their lives.
Apart from a website, LLI also had agents advertising on Facebook’s marketplace.
After payment the customers were blocked from contacting the company and those who tried to report the matter received threats saying “we know where you live”.
By Thursday afternoon the alleged scammers had taken down their website and the Sunday Tribune sent queries to all email addresses linked to the company.
Victims said those who wrote negative reviews about the company and reported the scam on Hello Peter said they were warned that the group was Cape Town gang-affiliated and that they were “cleaning” money for a known gang leader.
A victim who had been scammed through Facebook’s marketplace said his gut told him something was wrong and he recalled the payment. Several attempts later he spoke to an agent who caved in and admitted it was a scam and that five bank accounts were blocked after fraud had been reported.
“Immediately thereafter the attacks (telephone calls) started.”
Another victim was told that stock shortages caused delays in delivery and that he had to liaise with the courier company.
“I called the driver and he said he was on his sixth stop and we were ninth. From then on all communication stopped. Nobody answered the office line, WhatsApp, etc.”
Another victim who opened a case of fraud and harassment with the Greenwood Park police said he spoke to someone called Monique “who didn’t speak great English” and then to Mark, the warehouse manager, who sounded Portuguese or Mozambican.
“After getting a case number I reported this company to the Hello Peter site and tagged it to my Facebook page. Not long after that, I started to receive many threatening WhatsApp messages, video calls, and phone calls from different numbers.”
Pictures of the victim’s family were sent and they were asked, “Is the review worth it? You have 30 minutes to remove it.”
Nathanson said he went to the company’s physical address in George in the Western Cape.
“I found that this storage facility is in absolutely no way at all linked to Living Lifestyle Interiors or Furnitures, it's just an address. There's nothing, even the bank account showing the same name as the striker who owns the business account.
“To think that our system is that porous, that we can all be fools in this way. Anybody who’s been onto this site will tell you that it’s an immaculate site. You could be forgiven for being fooled by this lot because they really have done a good job,” said Nathanson.
Police did not respond to questions at the time of going to print.
