FIJ
Maximus Obumneme, a businessman living in Lagos, was on his phone when an email notification popped up. It was an email from Old Merchant, a car auction website advertising various cars.
That was in November 2023. A few days after the first message from Old Merchant, Obumneme received another email from Quality Assurance Autos (Qa Autos), another company involved in car auctions. A day after he had received the Qa Autos email, Obumneme began to receive multiple messages from both Qa Autos and Old Merchants advertising cars for auction.
“After those two messages, I began receiving multiple emails from both Old Merchant and Qa Autos,” said Obumneme.
Obumneme is an automobile enthusiast who constantly upgrades his collection. He was captivated by what he saw in the email and ultimately selected four cars from Old Merchant that fit his budget.
“I kept receiving emails about cars from two companies named Old Merchant and Qa Auto. Being someone who is interested in cars, I always changed my cars, and I always used Auction Export, a company based in the United States and Canada, and I never had problems dealing with them,” Obumneme explained.
“So, with what I saw on Old Merchant and Qa Autos, I decided to visit the websites, and I saw four cars that cost $12,740 on Old Merchant that I was interested in and decided to go for them.”
Obumneme didn’t know it, but he was dealing with a prolific and notorious car sale fraudster who defrauded unsuspecting individuals from West African countries interested in buying or auctioning secondhand (used) cars from the United States. Using email newsletters from his websites, as well as social media platforms like X and Facebook, the fraudster promotes his business to enthusiastic car buyers, concealing his true intentions.
In order to find out who is behind Old Merchants and Qa Autos and its operation, a Google search was first conducted on the business name and an analysis was also conducted on the website.
The phone number listed on the website, connected to WhatsApp and used for communication with Obumneme, was then verified with Truecaller, a smartphone app that can identify telemarketers and scammers through their phone numbers. The search revealed Alexander Rudsky registered the phone number.
For Qa Autos, it was discovered that an agent named Olga Binkovska-Abraham registered the car auction business as a limited liability company in Florida on May 17, 2023. A Google search on the name Olga Binkovska-Abraham first led only to an inactive Facebook account and links to Qa Autos registrations on various auto sales websites.
An LC amendment filed and signed by Binkovska-Abraham on May 20, 2023, included a phone number. A reverse phone search using NumLookUp, an information search platform, identified the owner as a Ukrainian woman named Olia Binkovska-Abraham based in Florida and not Olga Binkovska-Abraham, according to what was filed with the Florida Department of State Division Corporation.
Quality Assurance Auction, a company that has closed down, came to light during an investigation into Qa Autos. The company was also registered by Alexander Rudsky; the name previously shown as the proprietor of a phone number connected to Old Merchants.
More searches revealed that two companies, both named Quality Assurance Auction, were registered with the Florida Department of State Division Corporation.
One Quality Assurance Auction was registered as a limited liability company in October 2018 and was legally closed as a business on May 17, 2023, while the other Quality Assurance Auction was filed in September 2016 and its status is inactive.
The Florida Department of State Division of Corporation records show that Quality Assurance Auction was filed in 2018 but online records indicate the company has operated as an auction company since 2013, with Rudsky as the owner. Further searches revealed that Quality Assurance Auction had a Nigerian subsidiary registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) as Quality Auctions Nigeria Limited (Qa Auctions). The Nigerian entity registered as a private company limited by shares, operates as a general merchant and trading company, with Rudsky, Eric Gasper (Qa Auction’s Customer Support Officer) and Nigerian businessman, Otubu Adedimeji Samuel, as directors as at March 1, 2014.
Additionally, Qa Autos and Qa Auction displayed the same company logo on their websites and social media accounts. Qa Autos was registered using the same agent address as Qa Auction, which filed for dissolution on May 17, 2023, the same day Qa Autos was officially registered as a business.
A message was sent to Olia Binkovska-Abraham, the lady who registered Quality Assurance Autos, via WhatsApp and the email address on the document regarding Qa Autos. These messages had received no response at the time of filing this report.
In an investigation conducted over three months into Rudsky and his business operation, it was gathered that Rudsky was a 52-year-old businessman based in the United States who has been running a car salvage and auction business for more than 10 years.
Interviews conducted with his former employer, business partner, employees, and victims portrayed him as someone who impacted their lives negatively and made them question transacting financial business online.
The story about Rudsky’s victims, his relationship with former business partners, how his car auction business began and his legal battles has never been told.
Little is known of Rudsky’s history and life before setting his sights on West Africans as a destination for his car auction fraud business, but the first sighting of Rudsky’s business online was in 2013. His activities online show a man with a track record of fraud and a mastery of the car auction business.
However, piecing Rudsky’s personal life story together was hard, as it was observed that some information about Rudsky online had been deleted. This investigation was able to find that Rudsky also operated three more car auction websites: Salvage King, Monster Exports and Quality Car Guys.
Apart from being known as Alexander Rudsky, online records and court documents show that he is also known as Alex Brown Rudsky, Alex Brown and Alex Rudsky.
Despite operating for more than 10 years on the internet, Rudsky‘s true identity remained a mystery to his victims — even whether his business operation involving Old Merchant and Qa Autos is run by one person or more than one is unknown.
While this investigation was able to confirm Rudsky operated with a team in the United States, Nigeria and Ghana with Qa Auctions, it remains a mystery if he is operating Old Merchant and Qa Autos alone and how he operated Monster Exports and Salvage King with more than 15 victims losing money running into thousands of dollars.
Rudsky is an enigma with a checkered history. It is difficult to understand how Rudsky has evaded prosecution despite being known to law enforcement and numerous complaints against his fraud car auction business going as far back as 2014 targeting people in the United States and West Africa.
His criminal activities are known to some US agencies based on complaints filed by victims, but Rudsky has continued to operate unhindered. Three messages sent in July, September and October 2024 to Jonathan Stratton, Assistant United States Attorney with the State of Florida, the state where Rudsky registered Quality Assurance Auction, Monster Exports and Salvage King as business entities, were not responded to.
Stratton’s name and email address were listed alongside Karen Allen, a staff member of US Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (FLHSMV), as officials of the Complaints Board that could help with cases involving Rudsky.
Allen, Section Supervisor of the Motor Vehicle Fraud Unit at the Bureau of Motorist Services Support in the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles, responded on July 29 to an email inquiry sent to FLHSMV’s fraud unit. When asked if the agency was aware of Rudsky’s operation and why he had continued operating for over 10 years despite numerous online complaints from alleged victims, Allen stated that the unit had not received any submitted or signed complaints involving Rudsky.
Michelle Kramer, an Assistant Attorney General at the Florida Office of the Attorney General whose email was also listed among those to be contacted on the Complaint Board, did not respond to two messages about Rudsky and his businesses on October 8 and 24.
The United States Justice Department also did not respond to an email inquiry about Rudsky sent on October 24.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was also asked about Rudsky in an email inquiry sent on October 24. The agency was asked if it was investigating Rudsky and why he had continued to operate for more than 10 years despite multiple complaints by victims to the agency of them being defrauded by businesses. In a response sent on October 25, the FBI said it declined to comment.
The story of how Rudsky has been able to operate for long without being identified by his victims and prosecuted by the United States government despite numerous fraudulent complaints against him is a cautionary tale about criminals in the cyberspace. While Rudsky seems to understand how to operate his fraud enterprise on the internet and avoid prosecution, he has made a lucrative living by knowing how to target, defraud and disappear without being found out by his victims.
Obumneme said this was his story. He was a regular car buyer from the United States until Rudsky came along and defrauded him. He never heard of Rudsky until he was defrauded by the man, a mistake he said was due to him not researching the seller.
Online, Rudsky portrays himself as an expert in the car sales business. His main marketing vehicles for his services are WhatsApp, websites and social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and X.
To customers unaware of his scam activities, he is an expert on car sales. Rudsky’s past business associates and customers who fell for his fraud consider him a criminal.
While Rudsky’s identity was visible while he operated QA Auction, the other websites that followed Salvage King, Monster Exports, Quality Car Guys and Old Merchants provided no information regarding who was operating them.
The five websites had a business location and phone number for calling and another number used for WhatsApp to transact with customers.
Rudsky is listed as VP for sales on the Qa Auctions (inactive) website, alongside more than 15 staff members and dealers, according to information on WayBack Machine, an internet archive website.
The Qa Auction website was registered on August 21, 2013, according to information on the website found on WhoIS. The website appeared to have ceased operations in 2022.
Femi Alabi, a potential automobile buyer, had no idea that clicking on a link from a social media advertisement would lead to him being defrauded of $19,950 by a US-based car auction website. Alabi wanted to buy a new car for Dorcas, his wife, and while considering several options, he saw an ad on a Facebook page called Salvage King promoting a car auction sale. Drawn in by the message, he clicked the URL included in the post.
Alabi spotted a 2021 Toyota Highlander priced at $19,950 on the website and contacted the seller on WhatsApp. He was instructed to make the payment to a Wells Fargo (a US bank) account listed on the website. In April 2022, Alabi completed the payment, but Salvage King soon went silent and blocked him. Salvage King has since refused to deliver the car.
Salvage King was incorporated by Alexander Rudsky as a limited liability company on July 19, 2021, according to information found on the Florida Department of State Division Corporation website. However, the company ceased operation on May 17, 2023.
While searching the internet to get more information about how he could get his money, Alabi said he came across a US-based website, Complaints Board, that allows customers to lodge a complaint against a company that wronged them. He saw multiple complaints about Rudsky, QA Auction, and Salvage King and found out that he had been dealing with a fraudster.
“The whole situation was frustrating,” Alabi said. “I wonder how he had been evading capture for years. I even got a call from an official from Florida in March, after my complaint online and we spoke for a long time about what had happened to me. She promised to get back to me, and up to now, she hasn’t got back to me. She also told me to get a lawyer to pursue the case with Salvage King and Alexander Rudsky and I wonder how they expected me to do that from Nigeria.”
A message sent to an investigative research assistant with the Florida Office of the Attorney General, Rochelle Morgan, who had contacted Alabi, was not delivered.
On the Complaints Board website, there were more than 20 complaints by people from the United States and various other African countries who have fallen for the Rudsky fraud.
One of the complaints posted on the website was a 2015 post made by a Ghanaian based in the United States, Zakaria Abukari, who said Rudsky defrauded him of $10,500 for a 2014 Toyota Camry he paid for in 2014.
Another person, a Nigerian who only identified himself as Adebiyi, said he was defrauded of $70,000 through Salvage King between November 2021 and March 2022.
Olatunde Alabi, another victim, lodged a complaint that Rudsky defrauded him of more than $43,000 in 2021 through Quality Assurance Auction.
Alabi, a car dealer based in Lagos, wanted to get two vehicles for his customers and had contacted Quality Assurance Auction after coming across its promotion on Facebook and Instagram.
In a telephone interview from his residence in Lagos, Alabi narrated how he slept in jail for three days due to his customers reporting him to the EFCC despite also being a victim of Rudsky.
He had paid $14,200 for a 2016 Toyota Highlander in June 2021 to Qa Auction and communicated with a man who introduced himself as Eric and a lady called Jennifer.
“I have always got cars from the US. My problem started when a customer, who is a younger friend of mine from the United States, contacted me to get him a 2016 Toyota Highlander. Normally I buy from Copart and IAA, which I registered with. On those companies’ websites, I couldn’t get the kind of car he was interested in, so I decided to try Qa Auction, and they told me they had the car I was looking for,” Alabi said.
Alabi’s business with Qa Auction did not only stop with the Toyota Highlander. A Qa Auction representative told him that the car he paid for was already in the process of being sent, this prompted him to order a 2020 Camry that cost $29,800 for another customer.
After about two weeks of the first purchase, Alabi said Jennifer sent him a dock receipt, which he tried using in the tracking. However, the car was said to have been delivered to Sallaum Lines, which was supposedly on the ocean transportation company website, but it did not arrive.
“I sent both of them a message, and they didn’t respond. They later blocked me,” Alabi said during the interview.
Alabi further disclosed that he and his customer tried informing the bank he had transferred the money through.
The bank said it couldn’t do anything to help.
“When I discovered that I may have been defrauded, I quickly told my customer to inform the bank he transferred the money through, but was told by the bank there was nothing they could do since the money had left their bank,” Alabi said.
Alabi’s effort to get his money led to him contacting the US embassy and asking if he could speak with an FBI official.
The FBI official told him that the agency only does government-to-government interaction and he was advised to inform the EFCC, who would then contact them about his complaint against the American business that had defrauded him.
“Through my lawyer, I petitioned the EFCC in Lagos, and they told me to come and defend myself. They told me that since the fraud matter happened outside of the country, they could not do anything about it,” said Alabi.
He further said he was taken aback by the EFCC’s response since the EFCC helped the FBI with cases involving internet fraudsters in Nigeria.
It was observed that Rudsky ran Salvage King and Qa Auction simultaneously, as both companies’ websites were active during the same period and ceased operations in the same year. The Salvage King Facebook page stopped being updated in April 2022, three months after Qa Auction’s Facebook page was last active.
Monster Exports, one of the auto auction companies registered under Rudsky’s name in 2017, alongside Qa Auction, has attracted the most fraud complaints, according to analysis conducted across five consumer reporting and online review websites. The company filed an article of dissolution in October 2020 with the State of Florida.
Additionally, the business was registered as a private company in the United Kingdom in 2015. However, it was dissolved in 2017.
Mohammed Farouk Anka, a civil servant from Delta State, was among those who fell victim to the Monster Exports car auction fraud. In 2020, he lost $6,300 after bidding for a 2010 Lexus RX 350 through the company’s website.
Complaints Board, Ripoff, Yelp, Scampulse and SiteJabber, five consumer complaints and online review websites, contained more than 40 complaints reporting at least $500,000 lost to Rudsky’s fraud schemes.
To see a list of names/usernames and amounts conned by auto salvage and auction businesses registered by Alexander Rudsky, click here. It is worthy of note that this is not a complete list of individuals Rudsky’s companies deceived.
Before establishing Quality Assurance Auction in the United States and Nigeria, along with Salvage King and Old Merchants, Rudsky worked as an employee at Salvage World, a company involved in car auctions and salvage. Mark Alexopoulos, who managed Salvage World at the time, responded to a WhatsApp inquiry about Rudsky, saying, “Rudsky destroyed my family business and my life; we lost millions. The guy is an animal and a piece of garbage.”
According to Alexopoulos, Rudsky stole his customer database to start his business after he fired him for causing problems within his company.
“He killed me. He took 10 years of my life. I am 52 years old right now. Rudsky destroyed me. My business and family life. I have no idea how he has been able to evade prosecution. This issue led to me going to jail. I spent 16 months in jail, and my fiancée at the time left, though three years ago I got remarried. This guy sent me down a black hole of death. He is a bad person. You can’t understand the evil of this man (Rudsky),” Alexopoulos wrote.
Alexopoulos’s family started a car business in 2008 called Salvage World, an auction platform. He developed the software to market the company through Google, using a strategy that generated numerous keywords and attracted many customers.
He said he was introduced to Rudsky by a friend who spoke in glory about Rudsky’s work as a good salesman who did mortgages for banks.
“I lost millions of dollars because of Rudsky,” Alexopoulos said.
“When I hired him, everything was fine, but at the end of 2012, he started acting erratically. In April 2013, I had Alex Rudsky arrested for attacking me and another person in our office, and I kicked him out of my company. But afterwards, he used someone in our call centre with backend access to our database to steal over 120,000 customer emails and phone numbers. I took him to court, and the judge ordered him not to contact any customers, but he didn’t care about it.”
Rudsky did not respond to questions sent to him through the phone number which is registered in his name on Old Merchant. He did not give a reply to the allegations made against him by Alexopoulos.
One of the individuals who suffered when Alexopoulos lost the client database to Rudsky in 2016 was Aliyu Aruna. Aliyu changed his mind about purchasing cars from the car auction firms he had previously intended to buy from after receiving an email from a website that specialised in car salvage and auctions. He received the email when he was finalising the process of establishing a salvage-and-auction car trading business in the US.
His plan was to buy cars from verified car dealers selling salvage and auction cars. But the email he received from Quality Car Guys enticed and convinced him to abandon sellers he had planned on doing business with.
“The company defrauded me of more than $62,000. I wanted to get an Escalade and a Mercedes Benz,” said Aliyu in a telephone interview on WhatsApp.
“Quality Car Guys was not among the companies I was looking at when starting the business, but they had prices on their website that enticed customers. It was an effective strategy, and many people fell for it. Who doesn’t want to buy something cheap or even $1,000 or $2,000 less to increase their profit margin? He knew this strategy would be especially effective in the African community and targeted them. Africans are looking for opportunities. We hustle a lot and are always seeking ways to make bigger profit margins.”
Aruna said he reported to the FBI and was told that the amount Quality Car Guys defrauded him of ($62k) was not up to the amount that would make them pick up the case.
“I tried looking for other victims so that it could get to $100,000, but I was only able to come up with $82,000 with mine and the other two victims I found. I reported to government agencies, and nothing was done about it,” Aruna said.
Emmanuel Ugochukwu Ifedi, another victim, claimed Quality Car Guys defrauded him of about $20,000, and his business collapsed due to the fraud.
“I planned to report to the FBI but was told that the agency only goes after fraud cases that are $40,000 and above. I am only in business now because my uncle through his friend in Arizona gave me a fresh loan of about $35,000 to start all over again. I’m still paying this debt to date”, Ifedi said.
Additionally, Aruna and Ifedi complained to the FBI about Quality Car Guys via the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Centre in 2016 and 2017 respectively. They both reported receiving no response until 2020 when an agent contacted them to inform them that their complaints were under investigation. The agent requested supporting documentation, including invoices and payment receipts.
Although they submitted the requested documents, both said they had not received any further updates on the case.
Rudsky appeared to have deployed a different approach with the way he started Quality Car Guys. Unlike the other companies which were all registered in Florida as business entities, the invoice sent to customers by Quality Car Guys after payment showed a State of Maryland stamp.
Rudsky’s businesses also did not appear on Better Business Bureau, an American organisation that focuses on consumer protection and industry self-regulation. Rather, it showed a certain Jennifer Kovalev as the principal under the organisation’s contact information.
However, it was also observed that Quality Car Guy appeared to be a fictitious name registration under Quality Assurance Auction in the State of Florida by Rudsky.
Note: A DBA (Doing Business As) registration, sometimes referred to as a fictitious name registration, permits a company to use a name other than its official business name. A DBA may also be referred to as an assumed business name or trade name.
A phone number that Ifedi said a staff member of Quality Car Guys had used in communicating with him was screened by IPQS, an open source tool used for phone number verification. It showed that the phone number was registered to Alexander Rudsky when a reverse name lookup was conducted on the number.
Rudsky and Qa Auction entered the Nigerian market in 2014, using Nairaland, a popular Nigerian forum, as their initial platform to promote the business.
Two Nigerian employees of Qa Auction actively praised Rudsky’s work and success, encouraging Nigerians to patronise the company.
One employee, identified only as Francis, posted advertisements from September 12 to September 17, 2014, describing the types of vehicles available and directing interested buyers to the Qa Auction website. Francis did not respond to messages sent via WhatsApp.
Another employee, known as Tola, praised Rudsky and Qa Auction in two articles on Nairaland in October and November 2014. However, when contacted through a number listed on a Qa Auction leaflet on Nairaland, Tola claimed not to know about the articles.
In a WhatsApp interview, Tola confirmed working with Rudsky and Qa Auction in 2014, but when asked more questions about their operations in Nigeria, he became incoherent. Tola eventually disclosed that the company had severed ties with Rudsky after discovering he had cloned the website and was directly engaging with clients.
Otubu Adedimeji Samuel, the Nigerian director at Qa Auction in Nigeria, confirmed in an interview that his firm ended its relationship with Rudsky after discovering that he was failing to deliver cars and secretly dealing with clients. He also revealed that he shut down the business upon learning of Rudsky’s actions and claimed Rudsky defrauded him out of over $20,000.
His business relationship with Rudsky started online between 2012 and 2013 after a car purchase from the United States.
“I was also defrauded of more than $20,000. He initially got some cars for me, which led to us starting a conversation. During a trip to the United States around that time, I told him I wanted to buy more cars, and he introduced his company to me,” Samuel said.
“We decided to establish a company in Nigeria to give the business a local presence. I was actively running the business here until I noticed delays with cars arriving in Nigeria. When I realised this, I decided we wouldn’t accept payments from any new customers until the outstanding cars arrived. Some vehicles eventually came, but others did not.
“As it became clear they wouldn’t deliver all the cars to Nigeria, I reached out to find out why and discovered my line was blocked.”
