Well, I've been a complete moron.

I bought 3 Nokia N95 8gb's from these wonderful people, which were supposedly shipped on March 12 but which haven't arrived yet. My email communication with them has not been very pleasant, they keep accusing ME of being a scammer. At one point I got a random email from them saying their google checkout account had been shut down for doing business with me. What?!?!? Funny thing is, my google account is fine, so if I'm the scammer why are THEY being shut down. I didn't get that one.

Is this a deliberate tactic they use? I'm not sure. They always seem to sidestep the issue of where the hell my phones are by accusing me of being a scammer. It's so frustrating and makes the whole thing so hard to deal with I've pretty much given up.

At the start, they made me send them a photocopy of my passport and bank statement before they would accept my order because they were wary of scammers. Because it was such a good deal I complied. I feel like a idiot for doing that now. I hate the fact that they have so much info on me.

They're run by a guy called John Anthony Castro. If you google him you get some interesting results. He's 23 years old, wrote a book about himself, and he's running for mayor in some town in the US. He also seems to have been involved in some dodgy internet scams too, judging from the complaints from very angry people on quite a few forums. Unfortunately only one of those complaints came up when I did a search 4 weeks ago.

I thought Google checkout was a reasonably safe method of paying but there was no tracking on the shipment so I think I'm pretty screwed... to the tune of over $1200USD. That's quite a bit of money for a uni student.

Below is a copy and paste of an email this guy sent to a member of another forum. Not a very nice guy obviously. My advice would be to steer well clear.