A COUPLE were jailed yesterday after conning thousands of eBay customers around the world out of £300,000 over two years.

Nicolae Cretanu, 30, and his wife Adriana, 23, Romanians living in East London, got people to send money for fictitious goods including cars, electrical items, tickets to sporting events and even parachute trousers.

The “well planned and sophisticated fraud” that involved the use of multiple bogus identities is the biggest yet committed on eBay.

Victims who bid for the goods advertised, half of whom were from America, were contacted by e-mail and told that they had been outbid for their desired item.

They were then offered a “second chance” to obtain a similar or identical item and told that if they were interested they should wire the money.

However, they never received the goods they had paid for and the couple were able to buy a BMW and a house with the money. The couple, who used a variety of aliases, sent the rest of the money back to their accomplices in Romania.

Cretanu was jailed for threeand-a-half years and his wife for two-and-a-half years.

Judge Duncan Matheson, QC, ordered that they should be deported at the end of their sentences. He said: “This was a major and sophisticated fraud.

“The period of the conspiracy alleged on the indictment is just under two years. I have been told there was something like 3,000 victims around the world.

“It exploited victims of the internet eBay system and it targeted a large number of people who parted with money under entirely fraudulent circumstances.”

He said that for nearly two years they and their Eastern European masters “exploited perceived weaknesses in the eBay system targeting a large number of people who parted with monies under entirely fraudulent circumstances”.

While it was “all very well” for them to insist they were “mere foot soldiers”, they nevertheless knew exactly they were doing and what they were involved in.

The couple and their accomplice, George Titar, 26, who picked up the cash from Western Union counters in East London, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obtain property by deception and money laundering between July 1, 2003 and May 31, 2005 at an earlier hearing. Titar was also sentenced to 30 months.

The fraud was uncovered by Scotland Yard’s economic crime unit after suspicious officials from the money transfer company Western Union contacted the police.

But Middlesex Guildhall Crown Court in London was told yesterday that despite the arrests the international con was continuing unabated and the couple’s bosses in Romania remain at large.

Detective Constable Andrew Bonafont, who led the investigation, said: “This was a wellplanned and sophisticated fraud involving the use of multiple bogus identities and modern telecommunications technology.

“It is on the biggest scale I have ever come across and conned thousands of victims worldwide.

“This kind of fraud is difficult to track down but due to the assistance of Western Union officers we were able to establish a pattern of collections, which led to the dismantling of the organised criminal network.”

Detective Chief Superintendent Nigel Mawer, head of the Specialist Economic Crime Unit, said that his officers were working with the Romanian authorities to target those responsible in Romania.

“People have been arrested and are awaiting trial for this type of fraud there,” he said.

An eBay spokesman said that the transactions did not take place on eBay and they worked with the police to ensure that the prosecutions were successful.

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