There has been a lot of industry talk about The Mowafi's, (Adam & Tarek Mowafi). Their enterprise Poweroffroad seems to be causing some problems amongst the business community as well as customers as people report on the web.
They are infamous for customer services and their poor refund policy.
Some documentation on the web:
- Tarek Mowafi of Poweroffroad rips someone of £2,000
- The Mowafi's dodgy business
- Trading standards court case
Update: It is reported that Adam & Tarek Mowafi have fled to Egypt. Please don't be discouraged to report them to the authorities if you had a bad experience. Also please continue to post your stories as this helps other people protect themselves from similar companies to Poweroffroad.
20 comments:
We have been waiting for a bike for 4 months. POR were fully aware that this bike was for my daughters birthday (this was 3 months ago) They have been full of false promises and out right lies. We've been given 1 delivery date after another but still no bike. Its a very cruel world were people like this can seemingly get away with it.
I ordered two mini quads for my two sons christmas's on 12th November. I sent a cheque for £400 which they cashed within two days.I've phoned,emailed,sent a recorded delivery but they still havent replied. They have ruined our christmas. Now I know how the farepak customers feel.
My son paid £437 for a pit bike, no bike no correspondence. Have also written and loged complaint both with POR and Trading Standards. Will keep trying to get our money back and lookforward to the court hearing 21st December 2006. Hope something comes of that so other people dont get ripped off.
i paid £1230 which was cashed on 5th Octobedr after numerous promised delivery dates still no buggy for my two sons christmas after toomany emails and phonecalls with no answer how an i supposed to tell my two sons no buggy and no money for replacement present? the are robbing ********
I purchased a Buggy thorugh the Mowafi's, guess what! got ripped off (£2000, got £700 back). My advise to people, if you can find others in same position employ Debt Collectors, for as little as £500. They have ways of finding them and if unable to get money back, can take goods to the tune of money owing. If not hopefully will put fear of God into them.
Good Luck
Dude
Does anyone know how to go about getting money back then because i ordered a quad for 600 and dont know what to do, thanks
Paid £1500 for a buggy and have been promised a refund I don't know how many times Has anyone managed to get money back? Could we all possibly go own and search them out!!
i went to pappers and lawyers i no this man will not attend the court hearing he is long gone .a have 2 boys with adhd hyperactive ,who need to have 24 hr care so we decided to buy them motorbikes for there christmas so we ordered them from power off road which is an english based firm ,they asked us to pay the money into there account so we did wat they asked but no responce watever so a contacted them by telephone still nothing so we contacted trading standered and they told us that they have heard that they were on watchdog having ripped people off so we went to a lawyer and he wrote a registered letter still we heard nothing so ,we went back to lawyer for advice and he told us because they r in england and we are in scotland theres only one thing we can do is go to england and take court action as we cant do it in scotland as the laws are differant but we have since found out that people in england are taking them to court on 21st december ,but thats not helping me get my money or motorbikes,so we dont have anything for my kids christmas due to this and we dont work as we care for our 2 sons who have severe behaviour problems and we cant afford to get something else for there christmas so ther christmas is ruined can u please help us let others know before anyone else gets there christmas ruined and they get ripped off.im crying as this is very upsetting because thats eveyones christmas in our family ruined please
my son bought a pit bike from poweroffroad on the 9th of may last year, they promised a delivery within 6 weeks as there was a waiting list. i waited and waited the day came and still there was no bike. my sons excitement was starting to gradually decrease. i rang, emailed and even wrote to poweroffroad and every time the reply was a delivery date which didnt exist. we paid £400 for a rampage generation 2 125cc dirt bike. we had watched videos and seen pictures of the bike it looked so good we bought it. just recently we had found out that the Mowafi's had seased trading and gone to egypt. after that we were really annoyed knowing they had our money also other peoples. we requested for our money back via a letter. the letter was returned to us unsigned. we hope to get our money back asap but we and everyone else had been scammed.
my brother and I like alot of others have been ripped off we had seen the web address to this and were looking for two little motorbikes so we bought two 125cc pitbikes coming to around £700 we had waited for couple of months during this period we had tryed emails, letters and phone calls and we kept getting random dates which meant nothing and then there whole web address and emailing system had shut down and i'am now needing some help on what im to do.
Adam Mowafi can be viewed on facebook.com
I ordered my daughter a 80cc quad bike costing £500 of POR. A few days after i sent my order away i recieved a call from POR to confirm my request and they told me to send a cheque i did what i was asked. I did this in 2006 now 2 years later 2008 no quad has been recieved. I have emailed and called and kept records of the dates and phone conversations.
The web site has now come to a complete hault and the web site has been shut down!
Scumbags!
Tarek Mowafi can be viewed on facebook too!
Tarek Mowafy and his family have rented an incredible estate from friends of ours in Egypt with your money. Guess what, they have not been paying them the rent and in my opinion are about to con some more people. God, my friend should have checked the internet before renting to these *****. Anyways, they need an orchestrated effort to bring them to justice.
Hi
Ny name is Mark hastler
while i cant comment on the familys past dealing becuase i didnt know them then
I know that family well, and very little of what is posted is true
I can see the person who posted the last comments is called rady atallah.
Rady attalah and his father wagi attalah are known theives in Egypt, after trying to sell their place to 2 people at the same time but were coaught in the act hence why they are posting rubbish.
His father wagi attalah also is a known drug dealer and can be often seen smoking hashis outside of his apartment window in zaimalic., whats funny is he makes it soo obvious when hes trying to hide
His son yaya attalah has been accused of rapeing a local male villager and is wanted by the egyptian police.
The truth needs to be known.
Having been browsing the internet yesterday for contact details for previous companies I worked for in order to update my CV I stumbled upon this when i thought i would look at what was said in the end of POR. I was a former employee at POR and I thought I would take the time to clear things up as it was about time somone did.
With regards to the blog sad to say you are clearly very miss informed and as a blogger whilst I understand you don't subscribe to any form of journalistic ethics maybe if the story was cleared up it might change some opinions.
Having worked there for over a year and a half from 2005 to mid 2006 the company grew from strength to strength the original aim of the company to at a time when a bike would cost £900 minimum make dirt bikes and quad bikes affordable to the masses. At its peek there was over 37 employees and we delivered over the time I was there over 9,000 bikes. This was no scam and if anyone uses some intelligence you will find there was nothing negative written about the company for over 2 years. These figures are very easily proven, go through China shippings record and you will find over 80 container loads imported by the company.
POR were sole agents for Apollo, Joyner and bifei.
I state with the upmost certainty that during my tenure none of the owners have any need or cause for the sake to "scam people or run away" in fact to be factually correct, you have stated that they fled to Egypt, actually Tarek has been in Egypt for most of time I worked in he company, he never fled he was already there, even when there when the company was at its most profitable he was in Egypt.
What led to the companies demise was what I believe a series of unlucky events poor CS handling due to poor management and an over Zealous trading standards. The companies whole structure was based on making small profits on large turnover, in 2006 Apollo supplied about 1600 incorrect items, as these were pre-paid essentially the customers money was already spent, and profits didn't cover anywhere near the amount required to cover full refunds. The company as left with 1,500 customers who couldn't be delivered as the stock was wrong.
I recommended at the time that the company stop trading but the owners insisted that they could turn it around.
Mr mowafy at this point put up his own personal money which was earned many years before this particular company even existed and ordered replacements. These would take about 9 weeks before they could be delivered.
This is where the over zealous trading standards came in, during this period they received about 1200 complaints, quite rightly from annoyed customers. As proof of his willingness Mr mowafy signed an undertaking that he would ensure this would not happen again, within the company this put us at ease we had a plan we knew what to do. Unfortunately trading standards didn't see it this way and although the complaints were just a trickle at this point they used the further complaints to start a case against the company, they were more concerned with justifying their expenses by seeking a judgement then they were the customers. What happen next was quite frankly unbelievable, after showing trading standards paid invoices for the replacements ensuring everyone would receive their bike or a refund within 4 months the posted a website stating that customers should cancel their order, what started happening was customers who had purchased products not affected by the incorrect stock started cancelling so it roller balled. No income and refund requests meant more and more stock from unaffected items arrived in but with no sales.
(part1)
(part2)
However will the full financial support of Mr mowafy who was in Egypt at the time as he had been for years we carried on, with him paying our salaries out of his pocket.
It was a rough time but we coped as day by day we were sorting out issues. Then the unthinkable happened, trading standards seized the computers, for an online company where all the phones and all customer service units are connected to the computers, this essentially closed the business. This was illegal as they were not legally allowed to shut the business down.
And so the story continues obviously with no phones working and no customer info customers rightly so became furious not realizing that we had no way of doing anything about it!!
Even so at that time Mr mowafy put up more of his money to clear 3 containers which held 1200 of the correct replacements to deliver to the customers even though the company was essentially shut, the containers were paid for and cleared but we had no customer info.
In an e-mail I helped structure we asked trading standards to return at least the CS computer or at least provide us with the files with delivery info so the customers could get their deliveries. All he people who posted here would have got their bikes.
Trading standards didn't want to help, their main concern was that their operation which cost £14,000 was justified. There was no point in fighting any more and there was nothing which could be done. With no way to reach anyone inaccurate info was spouted to the press who barely did any research to find out what really happened the matter ended with a court case which no one attended because it shouldn't have been started in the first place as the customers could have been delivered, and the fact the owners had been in Egypt already well before there were any problems. No one fled they were already there as they were from the begining always travelling between the 2 countries. To drive this point home further we at the company has his details in Egypt and so did trading stnadards he activly encouraged them to contact him to solve any problems, which they refused to do.
I sympathize with the customers who lost out, they were the victims in all this, and I am sure it didn't matter what happened but at least they should know what happened.
What I have said can easily be proved, the company used 2 hauliers TNT and night freight each of them hold records of all delivered items. China shipping was the shipper and if you look into you will see that 3 containers has been paid for and were in port and stayed there because trading standards refused to help the customers.
It was a sad ending to what was potentially a fantastic company.
It is clear this blog is being used to spout inaccuracies about the original case so setting the record straight is important. Mor mowafy was one of the most intelligent and honourable people i had worked with and to see such unresearched and factually inaccurate info posted is shuch a shame.
Anyone reading the above lies and bullshit should know that throughout the Poweroffroad fraud, Adam Mowafi routinely pretended to be an employee, a satisfed customer etc. spouting the same crap and promises which were never kept whilst they kept on cashing customer cheques.
The phony explanations above have Adam Mowafi's fingerprints (and characteristic typos) all over. Jamesc is one of his alter-egos. 'James Carter' claimed to be the manager of POR when dealing with customers and press, and in the corrupt pitbike forum, where as "Powermoderator" he assiduously removed critical messages and customer complaints. These are merely aliases used by Adam Mowafi to sustain the fraud.
The role of the authorities in this debacle needs investigation. Trading Standards were incompetent in pursuing the Mowafis, taking 18m and over 1,000 complaints to bolt the stable door. Surrey police were even more pathetic. There was an investigating officer, but he appears never to have done anything, even when repeatedly offered evidence by victims and journalists. And there is the very curious intervention of police when Tarek Mowafi was pursued by BBC's Watchdog, who turned up at his home only to find police waiting. Why, and why police chased the interviewer away, needs explanation. http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-1775899803952419631&q=poweroffroad
This was a deliberate criminal fraud, not just a few screw ups with deliveries. Between 1500 - 3000 people each lost an average of £400, an est. £0.5m - £1.1m. The Mowafis worked the scam until the last possible moment before fleeing UK with a great deal of other peoples' money, cashed at a bureau in Crawley to avoid the empty TSB bank a/c from whence they issued bouncing refund cheques.
Adam can't even remember the lies he told back then. Now he claims 1600 bikes were misdelivered. He said 400 back then. None were returned to China, the Mowafis sold them and kept the cash, whilst failing to refund or fulfil the original orders. There was always a next shipment that was going to sort it out, until they and the money vanished.
Tarek was awarded an 18m gaol sentence in absentia, and was supposed to pay the £14k costs. Adam should have had his hands cut off. He was the more active fraudster, systematically lying to customers before and after his "sicknote" dad had left UK.
Adam Mowafi is now running yet another web "enterprise" at www.tazkarty.net (and its affiliate www.cairozoom.com). This caters for Cairo's rich kids, of which he is now one thanks to the customers POR robbed.
Tarek's address appears to be Abo Sir, Geza, Badrasheen,11211, Egypt. Tel +20.0104902156
Adam can be found on Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=502136208 He is also Timmy Mowafi http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=500971344&ref=sgm
Just Google 'Mowafi Poweroffroad' to see the truth about these thieving scumbags.
Does anyone know where I can get the rampage bikes POR used to sell? I bought 3 from them and I want a similar one for my newphew in the same price range if possible
so, i know this is very old but i must say that the mowafi's are dumbest thieves you will ever meet. they don't even rehearse their lies and end up saying different things. recently wally was given a one year prison sentence for signing a false check. they are all in egypt now, but it seems like adam and his brother-in-law, yusef, are still ripping people off on the internet. they use an alias for their accounts and yusef handles skype converstions with 'customers', since adam can't do that anymore due to previous criminal records. they are not even careful as to not get caught, they are very sloppy and indiscreet. anyways, they are now living in cairo, giza specifically, in the same building as their office, still ripping off people and employees. there are many people in egypt who would just love to see them behind bars, especially amy and adam. they are the masterminds of all the crimes. so we know where they are, but why isn't anyone doing anything? and what will it take to actually get this case up and running because it seems like they are planning to go for another run.
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