Wholesale Roland (and others dealer) SCAM?

[Optic]

Royal Optima is a website based in Indonesia claiming to be a wholesaler of a lot of brands of equipment at some (too good to be true) low prices.

Anyone actually dealt with them?! My scamdar is going off bigtime, but it doesn't hurt to look into it a bit before writing it off as fraud...

www.royaloptima.com

Things I've noticed - all testimonials and news are from the same day - could just be that that's the day they updated their site, but scam potential is high.

Some "news" is stuff that's already happened in the past such as "come visit the Roland booth in October" when the news was posted in January.

I've made preliminary contact regarding shipping and they've said it's $350 to Canada for an XC-540 Pro III- overall English was good, with one spelling mistake in the message.


Can anyone with experience chime in?

Thanks!

 

[JeremySI]

shoulda stopped at Indonesia. all the printer scam sites are said to be from Indonesia

 

[jiarby]

They have hidden their whois info for the domain name:
http://www.whois.net/whois/royaloptima.com

The domain was created Jan 25, 2011.. and registered for 1 year. (yes, one month old!)


74.82.175.99 resolves to "74-82-175-99.indonetmedia.com"
Top Level Domain: "indonetmedia.com"

154 other domain names also resolve to that IP address..could be because they are using a shared hosting account... or, sometimes they have a lot of other scammy domains all hosted on the same box.

You can whois some of them to see if they come back registered to the same name/service as the original.

Any one thing is no big deal, but youhave to add up all the red flags and make a decision..

1. Private Registration. What are they hiding?
2. Domain only 1 month old. What did they do for a living 2 months ago?
3. Shared hosting account.
4. Other domains kinda spammy-scammy.
5. Located in Indonesia. No recourse if something goes bad.
6. Price too good to be true... preys on your instinctive greed.

I believe it is far better to pay more and buy as local as possible. You want to be able to go there and throw a brick through the window if you have to.

 

[Dice]

Walks like a Duck. Talks like a duck.

 

[GVP]

The way I look at it, is how would you feel if your customers were going to Indonesia for their signs rather than dealing locally (with you)?

 

[CheapVehicleWrap]

Those super low prices were probably correct at one time, but have yet to be updated to account for inflation.

 

[cdiesel]

Umm... I wanna say shipping on a printer in the US is typically $500-$700.

And the price for an XC is about 65% off list...

 

[Custom_Grafx]

If really worried, why not call Roland office in Indonesia and ask them? Pulled the below from roland dg official site - when you go to the website below - even that looks a bit funny for an official roland site - but at least they are listed as the official dealer.

============
PT. Bhinneka Mentari Dimensi

Jl. Gunung Sahari Raya 73C 5-6
Jakarta - Pusat, 10610, Indonesia
TEL +62 (0)21-4229555
FAX +62 (0)21-4257787
http://www.bhinneka.com/