5 car SCAMS so good even dealers get screwed

and the car in true Ferrari form went up in flames probably all of us have heard about the fantastic story of the Ferrari f50 getting jacked on a test drive from Algar Ferrari and then being hidden in plain sight in Kentucky via a VIN swap and finally getting apprehended by the FBI and being wrecked by a careless FBI agent so of course that's one of the fantastic stories but we know that scams happen on a regular daily basis and if we do any searching on Craigslist or Ebay we come across them ourselves of course there's always the fake cashier's check warnings and the people who want to send you too much money and then you refund them for the shipping and things like that or people that want them to send you a $500 deposit for a deal that's too good to be true but I've got a collection of a number of pretty incredible stories that will make you probably never want to get into the car business or at least never tried to buy a car from somebody you don't know again I believe this was actually my first client when I opened up switch cars after I left the land rover dealer and he had hired me to find him a Range Rover so we were looking around for pre-owned ones that were a decent deal but a good car and he was also looking and he found this one on ebay an aggressive deal but not too good to be true if retail was about fifty seven to sixty thousand at the time I think this one was 55 grand buy it now and he had great pictures and VIN number and he had a phone number where you could actually call and talk to him and he wasn't speaking in broken English could actually put sentences together and his email responses everything seemed to be legitimate the only somewhat red flag was that the car was in a warehouse in Texas and he was in Buffalo New York which isn't an immediate scam because I mean I've sold cars that are not in the same location that I am but it's certainly a something to be cautious of so my customer was ready to send this guy money and I noticed something was off and I called up my customer right away and I said Mike we got a problem if you look at the nav screen that is from a 2004 because it's got the twisty buttons and he was advertising it as a 2005 which has the touchscreen navigation I said that's that's not the right car so I started doing a little more digging through his eBay profile and he had hundreds of positive feedback so I went into the accounts that had left him feedback and I realized that all of their feedback for transactions were for penny transactions recipes and things like that and I started digging some more and realized that all of the ones below that were the same thing and they were basically just leaving each other feedback so this guy had created hundreds maybe thousands of eBay accounts to build up this large network of transactions and feedback to make himself look trustworthy this guy went to the Rob Pitt school of eBay manipulation and I contacted the FBI and let them know about this but they were busy and didn't get back to me but somebody I think I might have posted the details online as well to warn people and somebody contacted me a few weeks later and said hey we know you know about this guy but I sent him a cashier's check and I'm out fifty five thousand dollars and he's disappeared what can you do for me and I'm like nothing like call the FBI sorry I mean he's probably overseas by now but next time call me first cuz I probably would have saved you the money there is a gentleman in Ohio who had a penchant for buying black exotic cars with money that was not real and he knew how to play the part he was very personable he had fancy watches dressed well and actually had some money and knew how to talk the game so he would go into dealers and request a test drive he would even negotiate and he would buy a car and he got a Mercedes dealer with a SL and wrote them a check that was not good and you would think okay well why would somebody do this and he really just did it for the fun of it he lived locally and had a local driver's license would purport that he was an attorney and so of course you know a dealer would take a personal check from a local guy who lived in an affluent neighborhood who was an attorney why wouldn't you he can always send the sheriff if the check isn't good and of course attorneys have greater consequences if they write checks which are not good but of course he was not a real attorney and the checks were written on an account that was not real he ended up walking into another local dealer who is a friendly competitor of mine and bought a black Ferrari 430 Spyder proceeded to wreck it that night unbeknownst to the dealer he took it out and got high and drunk and t-boned somebody at an intersection and the car in true Ferrari form went up in flames so of course it got posted on wrecked exotics and stuff like that later on but the dealer had no idea at the time but they got a call from their bank the next day which was a Saturday that said hey there's something funny going on with this check so he contacted them Monday when they had called him frantically saying hey this check is no good and apologized profusely and said I'm sorry there was some error and said I'll wire you the money today and oh by the way I'd like to buy the Ferrari California you have as well for my brother and would you deliver it to the Justice Center downtown irony of all ironies and they called the local police and said hey we have to deliver this other car you want to set up a sting operation so that's what they did cops followed them down they parked outside the Justice Center with a Ferrari and as soon as he got in the car the cops swarmed and arrested him my landlord at the time is a Hudson police officer and she called me a few days later and said hey just want to let you know sorry didn't call you sooner but we had this guy in prison and he recently got out we put him away last time for buying black exotic cars with fake checks and he recently got released so just wanted to let you know because we know you sell exotic cars so well thankfully he didn't get me but you're a few days too late because he just caught one of my buddies client contacted me looking to sell their 996 Porsche gt3 and they had an on consignment at a local dealer go motors out of Boulder Colorado the dealer would consign any car for $1,000 Commission which I thought was a little bit odd you know maybe if you're doing lower end outies which they did that would be acceptable but for a gt3 I just said hey listen you can't survive making $1,000 on these types of cars I did some more digging on this go motors and I found a lot of negative feedback kind of covered up under there positive reviews nothing scam II just these guys aren't the the most up-and-up guys the gut check gave me indigestion so I called the customer and said listen I'd prefer to just buy the car from you directly and and cut out this dealer why don't you go get the car in the title from him and you know I'll just tell him the deal's off so he did and I ended up wiring money to the customer directly which one would think is the less safe way to do things I'm wiring money to some individual who I don't know with whom I have no recourse but it turns out that was the best course of action maybe a month later it came out that the owner of go motors was indicted for fraud he was selling cars on consignment taking the money and not paying the consigners and unfortunately the consigners are always out the money because they have really no recourse through the courts with these companies who file bankruptcy and the money's gone overseas already and even if they get a court injunction to seize the car case law states that the person who bought the car bought it on good faith and the law typically protects the person who bought the car and the consignment dealership you know I wouldn't have gotten screwed on that because I would have received the title in the car but I saved my customer from being out the money and of course he was very grateful and we've done business since then as well and I think I've sold that gd3 a couple more times since then so then of course there's always the overseas buyers who like sending fake checks and usually I don't entertain these guys but I figured I'd have fun with one of them and he had email me about a Diablo SV in some other car and asked me what my best price was and a couple months later he got back to me saying he wanted to buy the car and I think both of them were sold at that point but I just I'm gonna mess with him he's a scammer so why not so I tell him to FedEx me a check and he does from Nigeria or somewhere over there but it was a check drawn on a u.s. account from a company in Wisconsin and I looked up the company they're a large industrial company I looked at the signatures on the check and they were printed which is legitimate some companies will not sign their checks actually but I'm like this is I mean I knew it was a scam so I was just having fun with him at this point so I called up the company in Wisconsin and I deciphered the name that was one of the signatures and I asked for that person and turns out they actually worked there they were the controller at the company and I said hey just so you know you know somebody over in Africa is writing checks on your company's ik b half to buy some cars and i'm sure you may be aware of this or may not be but i want to let you know so i messed with him a little more and said hey the check is for the wrong amount you know please send me another one and just want to see how much money I can make him spend on international overnight packages but he probably wasn't paying those bills either but in spite of all my caution and experience I did get scammed once and I guess I'm not ashamed to admit it because it was a pretty good scam it was back when the Nissan GTR s were still being pre-ordered and of course I had a number of them at sticker price which I then sold for a hefty profit this guy contacted me out of the blue and said I have an allocation that I want to you know move on and it's at sticker and I just need you to reimburse me for my deposit amount now you might say well why would somebody give up an allocation at sticker as did I but that actually happens so this one seemed legitimate he faxed me the contract that he had with the dealer and the order spec and confirmation of order and everything checked out his only request was hey please don't call the dealer because I don't want to you know get in hot water and have them pull the allocation because they know I'm flipping it which was a legitimate request I mean when I was flipping Porsches I obviously didn't want the customers calling up the dealer saying hey I just bought your allocation for 50 grand over sticker from Doug because that would have immediately annoyed them and they would have found reason to pull the allocation other than the reasons they did anyway I sent him the $5000 and checked in with him every few weeks and the only red flag I got was he seemed to not really remember who I was when I called but I just chalked that up to scatter brained or whatever and you know I had sent him the money so what could I do at this point but just to keep checking in and I was on the golf course having a somewhat enjoyable day and I got a call from a Attorney General or some sort of detective or something like that in Iowa and said hey did you send him some money I said yes let me guess I'm not getting it back and he said that was the case and I was pretty bummed too definitely ruined a nice day on the golf course and I also thought later that it would be an even better scam if the detective who called me wasn't a real detective but he was somebody hired by this guy to call everybody so that they would feel at ease that oh well is being investigated and there's nothing else I can do and therefore not take any legal action [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 3,590,923

Rating: 4.8121095 out of 5

Keywords: Scam, Car Business, Car, Dealer, Dealership, Fraud, Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Craigslist, Consumer Advisory, PSA, Doug Tabbutt, Switchcars, VINwiki, Car Stories, Top 5, List, Advice, Avoid getting ripped off, Ripoff, Nissan, GT-R, GT3, 996, GoMotors, Consignment, Diablo, SV, Demuro, Ferretti, FBI, F50, Sting, operation, law enforcement, justice, check fraud, Nigeria, Flipping, Bad faith

Id: -rXhAnu5ETU

Length: 13min 39sec (819 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 06 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/DonnyTheNuts]

Clickbait title. First three stories are boring and not even particularly clever