Post by bracabric on Feb 4, 2010 12:09:16 GMT -5
The following is a warning to all importing or thinking of importing goods to the US. It's from a Motorcycle forum that has been most helpful to me as this site has with my Tractor
Dick
As most of our active members know, Stan and I have been working to import the Jinlun JL250P into the country for about a month now.
We had previously posted in other threads that we were looking to bring about 80 bikes in every month and sell them in the China-moto store along with eBay and some in person, face to face.
Well we got taken plain and simple, the reason we are swallowing our pride and posting this story is to protect other consumers and businesses from making the same mistake we did.
Everything below is true and backed up by emails, wire receipts and voice mails. We also have spoken to third parties who know and understand about this person who have backed up our claims, including his own parents.
Our nightmare begins.
Stan called me just before Christmas in 2009 and told me that the guy he had been talking to for about a year who was part of an import group in Kansas City Missouri, named Travis Oberg of Yoshita MotorSports had decided to lower their prices a little more than had been previously discussed so he could move some bikes, in this case the JL250P.
I decided I would not do anything at that time and Stan purchased three bikes via his PayPal account on December 26, 2009 and started awaiting delivery.
Over the next week or so Stan and I would speak often about these bikes, the price was right and I decided to talk to a friend and business partner for financing and go ahead and buy some of these bikes and guarantee the seller, in this case Yoshita Motor Sports, that we would buy 1,000 bikes a year if we could get them at this price.
Stan had been doing some business with this guy previously and he felt good about him so I decided to take a shot and move forward.
So on January the 11th 2010 I wired $8450 and then on January the 14th 2010 I wired another $7800. This was for 25 bikes that were from the year 2009, which we all know there is no mechanical difference between 2009 and 2010 and we could sell the bikes shipped for under $1600 and still make a nice little profit per machine, nothing major but a nice little profit none the less.
This is when the fun really started. Travis Oberg told me that the first 13 bikes had shipped from Roketa (Who is the importer for the JL250P) on January 15th 2010 and that our other 12 bikes shipped on January 18th 2010.
By this time Stan was starting to get worried. He had ordered his bikes on December 26th 2009 and had not seen a single bill of lading or a pro number to track from a reputable trucking company.
When Stan pressed this with Travis Oberg, Travis gave him a pro number for a shipment from a company called mid state trucking (we cannot prove they even exist) and he gave Stan a telephone number which turned out to be a Verizon wireless number. I still don’t think Stan has gotten them on the phone yet.
On January the 21st after over a week of begging Travis Oberg for some tracking information I finally sent him an email basically telling him I thought he did not have our bikes and this was a scam. I knew from past experience that it took about four or five business days for motorcycles to get here in Alabama from California but no matter who I had purchased from in the past the seller had always provided me with a bill of lading and a pro number within 36 to 48 hours even if the shipment would take longer.
He could not provide this information.
After reading the email he freaked, told me Stan and I were crazy and that he would never do business with us again. Uh, Ok. No problem, but where are my bikes I asked?
He told me the shipping company screwed up and sent them to Kansas City where he lives and supposedly had a building that he did business out of.
I told him, ok, this seemed acceptable and to forward our bikes from Kansas City to us in Alabama.
He agreed and we made up. This seemed like a logical thing that could have happened, hell we all know how unorganized Roketa can be so I gave it no thought, but I did ask where were Stan’s bikes that were now just a few days shy of one month since he ordered them on December 26th 2009.
The only excuse he could give to me was that they were on the way and that Stan had ordered between Christmas and New Years and they had a bad snow storm during that time preventing a normal delivery time. He still would not give valid tracking information though or for that matter any proof at all that he ever had them.
So ok, my gut is telling me this is not right but I pass it off to bad timing and move forward. Stan however is not so happy.
During the weekend of January 22nd 2010 Stan and I were on the phone one night talking about this stuff and wondering if we had been conned out of our money when I decided to do a little investigation.
You see, Travis Oberg had faxed me 18 MSO’s from Roketa that had valid VIN numbers on them, across state lines of all things…... So I thought I would run the VIN’s and see what I could find out about the bikes.
One problem arose because I could not run California VIN numbers online. So that was a wash, however I could run a criminal background check on Travis Oberg.
What I saw after running the check made my jaw hit the floor. This guy had close to thirty cases for fraud since 1989 to 2006. I will not get into the details of each case here as that is not what this thread is about, but let’s just say the guy has made a career out of doing some bad things to other people and their money.
So I did some more digging and came up with this website for the DOC in Kansas City Missouri.
web.mo.gov/doc/offSearchWeb/searchOffender.do
Type in Travis, Oberg and look at the pretty jail pictures complete with a parole officer’s name and phone number. Interestingly these photos were taken only 1.3 miles from Travis’s supposed office.
So at this point I decided we had been taken and Stan decided to go and file a dispute with Paypal to see if there was any chance in hell of him getting his money back.
Travis Oberg failed to respond to PayPal and in three days PayPal agreed with Stan and gave Stan a credit back on his credit card which was attached to his PayPal account.
So at least Stan got the bulk of his money back which was something good.
So by this time it is January 24th 2010 and I am calling and calling Travis Oberg to try and see if he will just give me my Pro numbers so I can have some peace of mind. So on the 24th I finally get him on the phone that evening and he tells me he will have some tracking information for me the next day.
The morning of January 25th I had two wonderful bill of ladings and two pickup numbers from YRC.com trucking company. I got on the phone and verified that the bikes were to be picked up that day from 12 noon to 5pm @ his address of 4400 Truman Ave. in Kansas City, MO.
So at this point I was feeling really good, I made a call to Stan who brought me back to earth by reminding me that the bikes had not been picked up and anybody can generate a bill of lading with pickup numbers from a computer with a webrowser and internet connectivity.
So I waited, Stan had to be wrong, right? He just had to be…..
Well that afternoon around 5pm I called the trucking company and sure enough a Travis Oberg had called in about 2pm that day and moved the pickup from Monday to Tuesday. I talked to Travis Oberg that night and he told me that the trucking company made a mistake but he did not know I had already caught him in a lie as the trucking company had made sure to ask him his name and had made a note of this when he called in that day.
So the next day the same thing happened again, moved from Tuesday to Wednesday and then the next day Wednesday to Thursday.
Thursday I actually contacted the driver who was to pick these bikes up at around 4:30pm that afternoon. I promptly did a Google lookup on the address, 4400 Truman Ave and found that the business Fat or Phat heads, not sure how they write that out, was located at this address. Travis Oberg had told me that his mother ran a thrift shop in the front of the building so I decided to call this location in hopes of finding Travis since he was not answering his cell phone and I could not leave him a message as his voice mail was filled up by this time, almost daily.
I was calling to let him know the truck was on the way and to be ready for them.
Well I got his mother instead who told me Travis did not have an office there and did not have our bikes there. In fact she told me the only time she saw Travis was on Christmas and his birthday.
She gave me the email address to her husband, a Mr. Forrest Oberg, and asked that I tell my story to him as Travis Oberg had been going around telling everyone that he and his dad were in business together and that his dad owned this company, Yoshita Motor Sports.
I also sent Travis a pretty pointed email telling him I now knew he had lied about almost everything he told me which was filled by a night of hate filled emails back and forth between the two of us.
The next morning Mr. Forrest Oberg called me and I must say I was delighted to talk to him, he is a VERY nice man who I personally believe is a man of his word. I spoke in great detail about Travis and what had taken place and he said he would intervene between Travis Oberg and myself and try and make this deal happen.
Mr. Forrest Oberg told me he did not own the company but rather Travis Oberg did.
Travis told his Father, Mr. Forrest, that he had the bikes in Kansas City and he would get these bikes out but now he wanted me to sign away my rights by signing a “Hold Harmless” agreement before he would ship them.
I refused and told Mr. Forrest Oberg that he had my word that if Travis Oberg sent our bikes he would not have any problems out of me. I just wanted my product which Travis had admitted to his father that he had and that he had our money.
Over this last week Mr. Forrest Oberg had been promised by Travis Oberg that he would send photos to him showing he had the bikes in town.
I explained to Forrest in my last email to him yesterday that I did not think Travis had our bikes nor would he be receiving any photos in my opinion. And to be honest I do not need to see any photos, I just wanted to see a Pro number with the bikes on the truck.
I had given a February 4th 2010 deadline, if to no one else myself that by Friday morning I would be going to my business partner and writing him a check and buying this debt from him and moving on with a criminal case against Travis Oberg and that is what I plan to do.
The money is gone and I will never get it back but if we can stop him I think we will have done the Chinese motorcycle community a great favor. As he is still on parole and has a rich history of defrauding people this should be fairly easy to do.
It turns out Travis has not only done this to me but to many others as well, there is a growing community of people who have been taken advantage of by this man.
I’m not going to define what is about to happen to Travis Oberg on this forum, again, this thread is not about that, it is meant as a warning to anyone out there who thinks they are getting a good deal to not walk, but run away, as they will never receive anything for their money but lies and grief.
The moral of story is stay away from Travis Oberg, Yoshita Motorsports, and a lady named Tammie Bindal who is his girlfriend I have been told and owns the fax land line that Travis uses to extort money from people.
Everything I have said in this thread is true and can be verified by emails, voice mails, bill of ladings, pickup numbers, law enforcement and wire receipts.
So currently I am out $16250 and I have no bikes. As discussed above I am aware that I will never see this money and I will move forward and allow law enforcement to deal with Travis Oberg.
Hopefully his days of using fraud to make a living are going to be over VERY soon.
Thanks for reading and be careful out there
Dick
As most of our active members know, Stan and I have been working to import the Jinlun JL250P into the country for about a month now.
We had previously posted in other threads that we were looking to bring about 80 bikes in every month and sell them in the China-moto store along with eBay and some in person, face to face.
Well we got taken plain and simple, the reason we are swallowing our pride and posting this story is to protect other consumers and businesses from making the same mistake we did.
Everything below is true and backed up by emails, wire receipts and voice mails. We also have spoken to third parties who know and understand about this person who have backed up our claims, including his own parents.
Our nightmare begins.
Stan called me just before Christmas in 2009 and told me that the guy he had been talking to for about a year who was part of an import group in Kansas City Missouri, named Travis Oberg of Yoshita MotorSports had decided to lower their prices a little more than had been previously discussed so he could move some bikes, in this case the JL250P.
I decided I would not do anything at that time and Stan purchased three bikes via his PayPal account on December 26, 2009 and started awaiting delivery.
Over the next week or so Stan and I would speak often about these bikes, the price was right and I decided to talk to a friend and business partner for financing and go ahead and buy some of these bikes and guarantee the seller, in this case Yoshita Motor Sports, that we would buy 1,000 bikes a year if we could get them at this price.
Stan had been doing some business with this guy previously and he felt good about him so I decided to take a shot and move forward.
So on January the 11th 2010 I wired $8450 and then on January the 14th 2010 I wired another $7800. This was for 25 bikes that were from the year 2009, which we all know there is no mechanical difference between 2009 and 2010 and we could sell the bikes shipped for under $1600 and still make a nice little profit per machine, nothing major but a nice little profit none the less.
This is when the fun really started. Travis Oberg told me that the first 13 bikes had shipped from Roketa (Who is the importer for the JL250P) on January 15th 2010 and that our other 12 bikes shipped on January 18th 2010.
By this time Stan was starting to get worried. He had ordered his bikes on December 26th 2009 and had not seen a single bill of lading or a pro number to track from a reputable trucking company.
When Stan pressed this with Travis Oberg, Travis gave him a pro number for a shipment from a company called mid state trucking (we cannot prove they even exist) and he gave Stan a telephone number which turned out to be a Verizon wireless number. I still don’t think Stan has gotten them on the phone yet.
On January the 21st after over a week of begging Travis Oberg for some tracking information I finally sent him an email basically telling him I thought he did not have our bikes and this was a scam. I knew from past experience that it took about four or five business days for motorcycles to get here in Alabama from California but no matter who I had purchased from in the past the seller had always provided me with a bill of lading and a pro number within 36 to 48 hours even if the shipment would take longer.
He could not provide this information.
After reading the email he freaked, told me Stan and I were crazy and that he would never do business with us again. Uh, Ok. No problem, but where are my bikes I asked?
He told me the shipping company screwed up and sent them to Kansas City where he lives and supposedly had a building that he did business out of.
I told him, ok, this seemed acceptable and to forward our bikes from Kansas City to us in Alabama.
He agreed and we made up. This seemed like a logical thing that could have happened, hell we all know how unorganized Roketa can be so I gave it no thought, but I did ask where were Stan’s bikes that were now just a few days shy of one month since he ordered them on December 26th 2009.
The only excuse he could give to me was that they were on the way and that Stan had ordered between Christmas and New Years and they had a bad snow storm during that time preventing a normal delivery time. He still would not give valid tracking information though or for that matter any proof at all that he ever had them.
So ok, my gut is telling me this is not right but I pass it off to bad timing and move forward. Stan however is not so happy.
During the weekend of January 22nd 2010 Stan and I were on the phone one night talking about this stuff and wondering if we had been conned out of our money when I decided to do a little investigation.
You see, Travis Oberg had faxed me 18 MSO’s from Roketa that had valid VIN numbers on them, across state lines of all things…... So I thought I would run the VIN’s and see what I could find out about the bikes.
One problem arose because I could not run California VIN numbers online. So that was a wash, however I could run a criminal background check on Travis Oberg.
What I saw after running the check made my jaw hit the floor. This guy had close to thirty cases for fraud since 1989 to 2006. I will not get into the details of each case here as that is not what this thread is about, but let’s just say the guy has made a career out of doing some bad things to other people and their money.
So I did some more digging and came up with this website for the DOC in Kansas City Missouri.
web.mo.gov/doc/offSearchWeb/searchOffender.do
Type in Travis, Oberg and look at the pretty jail pictures complete with a parole officer’s name and phone number. Interestingly these photos were taken only 1.3 miles from Travis’s supposed office.
So at this point I decided we had been taken and Stan decided to go and file a dispute with Paypal to see if there was any chance in hell of him getting his money back.
Travis Oberg failed to respond to PayPal and in three days PayPal agreed with Stan and gave Stan a credit back on his credit card which was attached to his PayPal account.
So at least Stan got the bulk of his money back which was something good.
So by this time it is January 24th 2010 and I am calling and calling Travis Oberg to try and see if he will just give me my Pro numbers so I can have some peace of mind. So on the 24th I finally get him on the phone that evening and he tells me he will have some tracking information for me the next day.
The morning of January 25th I had two wonderful bill of ladings and two pickup numbers from YRC.com trucking company. I got on the phone and verified that the bikes were to be picked up that day from 12 noon to 5pm @ his address of 4400 Truman Ave. in Kansas City, MO.
So at this point I was feeling really good, I made a call to Stan who brought me back to earth by reminding me that the bikes had not been picked up and anybody can generate a bill of lading with pickup numbers from a computer with a webrowser and internet connectivity.
So I waited, Stan had to be wrong, right? He just had to be…..
Well that afternoon around 5pm I called the trucking company and sure enough a Travis Oberg had called in about 2pm that day and moved the pickup from Monday to Tuesday. I talked to Travis Oberg that night and he told me that the trucking company made a mistake but he did not know I had already caught him in a lie as the trucking company had made sure to ask him his name and had made a note of this when he called in that day.
So the next day the same thing happened again, moved from Tuesday to Wednesday and then the next day Wednesday to Thursday.
Thursday I actually contacted the driver who was to pick these bikes up at around 4:30pm that afternoon. I promptly did a Google lookup on the address, 4400 Truman Ave and found that the business Fat or Phat heads, not sure how they write that out, was located at this address. Travis Oberg had told me that his mother ran a thrift shop in the front of the building so I decided to call this location in hopes of finding Travis since he was not answering his cell phone and I could not leave him a message as his voice mail was filled up by this time, almost daily.
I was calling to let him know the truck was on the way and to be ready for them.
Well I got his mother instead who told me Travis did not have an office there and did not have our bikes there. In fact she told me the only time she saw Travis was on Christmas and his birthday.
She gave me the email address to her husband, a Mr. Forrest Oberg, and asked that I tell my story to him as Travis Oberg had been going around telling everyone that he and his dad were in business together and that his dad owned this company, Yoshita Motor Sports.
I also sent Travis a pretty pointed email telling him I now knew he had lied about almost everything he told me which was filled by a night of hate filled emails back and forth between the two of us.
The next morning Mr. Forrest Oberg called me and I must say I was delighted to talk to him, he is a VERY nice man who I personally believe is a man of his word. I spoke in great detail about Travis and what had taken place and he said he would intervene between Travis Oberg and myself and try and make this deal happen.
Mr. Forrest Oberg told me he did not own the company but rather Travis Oberg did.
Travis told his Father, Mr. Forrest, that he had the bikes in Kansas City and he would get these bikes out but now he wanted me to sign away my rights by signing a “Hold Harmless” agreement before he would ship them.
I refused and told Mr. Forrest Oberg that he had my word that if Travis Oberg sent our bikes he would not have any problems out of me. I just wanted my product which Travis had admitted to his father that he had and that he had our money.
Over this last week Mr. Forrest Oberg had been promised by Travis Oberg that he would send photos to him showing he had the bikes in town.
I explained to Forrest in my last email to him yesterday that I did not think Travis had our bikes nor would he be receiving any photos in my opinion. And to be honest I do not need to see any photos, I just wanted to see a Pro number with the bikes on the truck.
I had given a February 4th 2010 deadline, if to no one else myself that by Friday morning I would be going to my business partner and writing him a check and buying this debt from him and moving on with a criminal case against Travis Oberg and that is what I plan to do.
The money is gone and I will never get it back but if we can stop him I think we will have done the Chinese motorcycle community a great favor. As he is still on parole and has a rich history of defrauding people this should be fairly easy to do.
It turns out Travis has not only done this to me but to many others as well, there is a growing community of people who have been taken advantage of by this man.
I’m not going to define what is about to happen to Travis Oberg on this forum, again, this thread is not about that, it is meant as a warning to anyone out there who thinks they are getting a good deal to not walk, but run away, as they will never receive anything for their money but lies and grief.
The moral of story is stay away from Travis Oberg, Yoshita Motorsports, and a lady named Tammie Bindal who is his girlfriend I have been told and owns the fax land line that Travis uses to extort money from people.
Everything I have said in this thread is true and can be verified by emails, voice mails, bill of ladings, pickup numbers, law enforcement and wire receipts.
So currently I am out $16250 and I have no bikes. As discussed above I am aware that I will never see this money and I will move forward and allow law enforcement to deal with Travis Oberg.
Hopefully his days of using fraud to make a living are going to be over VERY soon.
Thanks for reading and be careful out there
