Luxury Car Auction Scammer Arrested
from the what-was-he-thinking? dept
There are hundreds of stories of auction scammers out there who sell products and then never deliver the goods, but sometimes you read about people who are so blatant, you have to wonder what they’re thinking. Generally speaking, if you’re going to scam someone that way, you probably don’t want to be easily findable afterwards. So why would you set up a specific company to sell luxury automobiles, including a set address, and then auction off cars that you never delivered? In some cases the guy did deliver a car – but it was often not as advertised. In other cases, he just didn’t deliver the car at all. In one case they describe, the car listed (a $155,000 Aston Martin Vanquish) had actually been totaled in an accident and no longer existed. This, of course, brings up the folks on the other side of this deal. If you’re going to spend $155,000 on a luxury car online, aren’t you going want a little more proof that it’s real before you dash off the check? Or, at least, aren’t you going to look up the info on that car to find out that it’s in the scrap yard somewhere?
Comments on “Luxury Car Auction Scammer Arrested”
different scam
I had a coworker who sold several vehicles via internet auction and had the winning bidder try to run a scam where they paid with a cashier’s check that was for about twice the amount of the winning bid and instruct her to send the overpayment to a person who was going to come and pick the vehicle up and drive it to the new owner. Turns out that the checks were forgeries. The buyer originated out of Nigeria in every case. The first time it happened she deposited the check but had trouble contacting the person who she was supposed to send the extra money to. She wanted to set up a time for him to pick the car up. Because of the delay (a week) she got a phone call from the bank telling her the check was bogus. She tried to contact the buyer but he suddenly disappeared. After that she told all winning buyers that all checks would be held until they cleared the bank. She had three or four “buyers” suddenly drop out of sight. When she added this disclaimer to all her auction listings the problem went away.
Re: different scam
This is a classic example of the new nigerian 419 scam. I’m sure Mike’s run a paragraph on this one, too, with links.
You want to tell your friend to be careful even with cheques that clear, as I think some cheques in those cases also appeared to have cleared, only to have come up bad later on, and the bank siezed the funds. Something shady like that.
Look up the story again, give it a read, and pass it on to your friend.
Re: Re: different scam
Yeah, actually, I did run a paragraph on this, back in March:
The Latest Email Scam
That article points out that you need to wait until well past the check clears, because it’s often discovered to be fake even later.