Man Loses $7K in Internet Scam, Police Say

The following information was supplied by Newtown Township Police. Any arrests or charges mentioned do not indicate guilt or conviction.

Theft—100 block fo Masons Way in Newtown Square at about 11:37 a.m. on April 13. The victim reported to police that he lost $7,150 in an Internet scam, according to the report.

The man had a Ford Focus he wanted to sell so he listed the car on cars.com. On April 1, he received a text message from a person who introduced himself as "David McDonalds" with an email address of icemondo3@yahoo.com, according to the report.

Police googled the email address and found it had been used in numerous scams involving buying cars over the Internet, according to the report, and the scammer has used numerous aliases and phone numbers connected to the email address.

Also, many, if not all, of the emails from "McDonalds" has the header in German, according to the report. 

"McDonalds" had the victim send him monies via MoneyGram and all funds sent via MoneyGram are non-recoverable, according to the report. The MoneyGrams site also has warnings on it to not send money to anyone you don't know and even mentions car buying scams with a similar warnings, according to the report.

It appears unlikely that the victim will get any restitution on the money he put out for transportation, service, custom fees, port and other fees, according to the report.