Classic Car Sales Scams – Advanced New Fraud

So there’s a new type of fraud. Well, it’s not brand new but it’s rolling out quite a bit more than it used to be with classic car sales—fake classic car sales.

How Scammers Operate
Here’s what the scammers will do: they will find the name and address of a used car dealership and they will create a website that’s very similar in name. Let’s say it’s called Joe’s cars. They will make a website that is Joe’s used cars inc.com and they’ll get the logo and the picture of the building from Google Earth. They’ll get photos of vehicles that they scrape from different websites and they’ll make a very nice-looking used car classic car for sale website.

The Appeal of Classic Cars
Because classic cars many times are not bought locally, look if you’re selling a 2022 Toyota Corolla you don’t need to go halfway across the country to get that car because you can find one near where you live. But if you want a 1969 Z28 Camaro, you’re going to have to probably take whatever you can get wherever it is in the country. The chances of one of those cars being right next to your house are slim. So people buy them remote. They may want to go look at them but a lot of times you have to send a deposit in advance or take pictures or take videos.

Creating a Fake Website
So what these scammers will do is they’ll make a fake website of a car dealership. They make it look legit. They put the address of a real car dealership so if you Google the address, yep, there’s the car dealership. They’ll put a phone number that rings to them and they’ll get pictures, not necessarily from the car dealership that they’re cloning, that they’re making you know, identity theft, but they’ll find great cars online elsewhere and they’ll take the pictures. No Photoshop, maybe the logo of this fake car dealership on the front license plate, maybe on the sign in the background. They’ll put the fake car dealership name and they’ll put really slick good-looking photos and even videos that they scrape from the internet on the website.

Engaging with the Victim
They take the call and they say, “Yep, this is Joe at Joe’s used cars. Do you want to buy this car?” Yep, and they’ll go back and forth with you. They’ll send you pictures. You can ask them to send a new picture; they’ll send you an updated photo. Eventually, you’ll say, “I want to buy it,” and they’ll say, “Well great, do you want to come see it?” “Well, I’m not really local.” “Okay, well if you send a deposit, we’ll hold it and we’ll either ship it to you or you can send an inspector.” They’ll take a deposit and of course, it’s a scam, right?

Preventing the Scam
So how do you prevent this from happening? The first thing you do is anytime you are going to buy anything or send money remote, make sure you can positively identify the company you’re doing business with. Also, look up their website to see when it was formed. You can do a WHOIS lookup on a domain name, which is a web address. Joe’s cars.com, you can plug it into a website called WHOIS, it’ll tell you what date it was formed. Most of these were formed within the last four or five months because they can’t keep running this scam for too long because they’ll get bad reviews. So if you see the website was formed recently, that’s a red flag.

Verifying Business Details
Then what you do is go onto Google Maps, look up that business, click on it on Google Maps, and look at the actual phone number. Because you can’t fake a phone number on Google Maps because they make you identify the business and call that number and say, “Hey, do you have this car for sale?” If it’s the real place, then you call the real number.

Requesting Proof
The third thing you do to make sure you’re not getting scammed is have the person send you a video of them walking on the lot of that place with a date and then show the car. Because a lot of times the videos they have are videos that were put on the internet months or years ago. Make sure it’s dated, make sure it shows the lot from Google Maps, not another showroom location, and make sure the one you can see on Google Maps.

Inspecting the Title
The last thing you do is ask them to send you a photo of the title of the vehicle. Because if they have the vehicle, they should have the title. If they don’t have the title, that’s a red flag. Or look at the title to see if it’s photoshopped. A lot of times they’ll take in they’ll Photoshop the words on it, the name of their dealership. Remember, the dealership’s name is probably not on the front of the title. So if they send you a title and on the front of the title, on their certificate side, right, this side, if the name of the dealership is listed as the owner, that’s probably a red flag. You might think that’s legit. Dealerships never put a new title in their name. Their name is signed over on the back from the seller and then they sign it over to you.

Contacting DMV
So if they send you one with their name printed on the front, that’s also a red flag. The last thing you can do to verify the title is you can contact the Department of Motor Vehicles in the state where that title was issued from and ask them. They won’t tell you the name because that’s privacy laws, but they can tell you if there’s actually a title issued from that state and they can tell you the title number and it should match what the scammer sent you.

Be Cautious
Be very careful because these scammers are taking tens of thousands of dollars from victims for deposits on vehicles that they don’t even have and they’ll bluff you and say, “Yeah, you can come look at it,” because they know you’re far away and you probably won’t.

Additional Precautions
Worst case scenario, if it’s a lot of money, you could go on Craigslist and find a local inspector that can go down and look at the vehicle. They may not be a car inspector but at least they can go put their hands on it, put their eyes on it, take a picture of it as a third party. It might cost you 50, 100 bucks to have somebody local go to a dealership and see the car but that will also keep you from getting scammed in that way. It still could be a scam; it still could be that dealership selling a bad car, but at least you’re not sending money, wiring it to somebody outside the country that made up a fake car dealership website to steal your hard-earned money.

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