The $2.5 million SCAM for a fake El Chapo McLaren F1

we end up settling on two and a half million dollars for what i believe is the greatest car ever built [Music] early in december of last year in 2020 i released a video kind of chronicling at that point my nine month hunt for the missing mclaren f1 in mexico chassis 39 the brown over red with gold wheels car that was tied to el chapo it was owned by the now deceased umberto ojeda aka el roboshivas aka the goat thief aka ricardo beltran aka albito de la loma aka el chapo's most prolific drug trafficker having moved over 220 tons of cocaine and made over 300 million dollars in the 90s killed in 1997 in a shootout with his car over 200 times his gold-plated armored jeep grand cherokee was shot and one bullet snuck in through the keyhole and killed him but not before he could drive his son who was also in the car to safety and at that point oheda had not told anyone in his family or anybody else where the keys were to his mclaren f1 so they hide the car from the government from the cartel from everybody else and so i made a video a couple weeks later with kind of an update on it because immediately following the release of the video i get thousands of messages with the whereabouts of the car or at least people's thoughts clues things like that but nothing super duper concrete and so that video releases right at the end of the year along with some other updates about things that had happened at finn wiki in 2020 and i always try to do that at the end of the year with just the little pieces and tidbits about some of the stories the lessons learned and things like that and i knew that headlining it with the el chapo mclaren f1 would help the views and it did it got 10 times more views than the one in 2019 or 2018 did and so but i almost didn't release that video because a day or two prior to that i had been contacted by two separate people with very similar reports of where the car was and that it was going to be available for sale and i wanted to make sure that that video didn't compromise that but it was a pretty compelling thing mostly because of two pieces of information both of them indicated that the father of oheda had the car and again about half of the reports that i had heard indicated that that it was being stored in a barn in camino real near kulia khan and that it was you know still in pretty decent shape but not consistent with the other rumors that said that the sun had it had figured out a way to make it run and was driving it around periodically and so again i don't want to recap everything in those two videos but around that time i'm talking to this guy and that was interesting because it was also consistent with probably the most concrete piece of information that i had gotten immediately following the release of the first video literally an hour or so later i get a call from a prolific south florida car collector who claimed that in early 2020 he had made an offer of 7 million to buy this car of course my immediate question was well who did you make the offer to he said well they had remitted the offer through a french painter who they had heard about through his lawyer he did some business in mexico so he had a lawyer in mexico who had represented the family in some matters the cartel family and that somehow the father had sort of granted access to this french painter to see the car because in the same way that it had been my goal to find and one day own this car this painter just wanted to see it long enough to create a painting of it the emil beret approach and so i was very excited to hear more about it but really the only thing that they had seen is that the painter had shown the lawyer a cell phone video not sent the cell phone video but shown it on their phone and it had been very good resolution certainly taken very recently and the car was as described and in pretty decent shape did not look mobile apparently in that video but regardless this was an interesting clue that once again pointed to the father having it and so both of these people contacted me and one of them claimed to be the previous husband or significant other of oheda's sister and so again she was saying that the father had it and this person claimed to have seen it about 10 years ago and they said at the time there was some damage to the front of the car so the car had been able to be driven at some point but wasn't being driven anymore because it had been slightly crashed not catastrophically but that the front end needed to be redone and that the car was entirely being repainted at the time well that's pretty interesting not entirely consistent with the painter theory but who knows nobody again has really given me proof that they know where the car is but they sent me a picture that i had not seen before and it was cropped very uniquely and it was cropped in such a way that you couldn't see the front license plate and that was where the most interesting piece of information from this report came they claimed that the car was legally registered in mexico and that in that picture there was a mexican license plate that had obviously been cropped out i said well okay the most interesting thing about that is that if the mexican government allows the car to be registered means they know generally where it is and they aren't out there trying to seize the car because that had always been my concern and really the concern of anybody who's ever chased the car that if you were to bring it into the u.s which you could do very easily after it's 25 years old which would either be late last year if it was built in late 95 or early this year it was built in early 96 which we think it was late 95 but my first request to this guy is can you send me the plaque that shows when the car was built and so he's told me that his daughter was going to be getting more pictures of the car because he was not currently in sinaloa she was but again if the car is legally registered then they have documentation that would show that which he was claiming to be trying to produce and it meant that i could probably own the car without having it be seized because in the u.s if you own something that was previously tied to drugs or illicit activity or fraud or anything like that it can always be subject to seizure to kind of be sold to reimburse those you may have harmed or those who may have been harmed through it even if you weren't involved and so it was one of the fears that i had discussed with this car collector in south florida and he said yes in fact in understanding that with his lawyers he actually if he was able to buy it was never going to bring it to the u.s which was kind of disheartening because i mean certainly i would want to own it here but he said he would probably send it and go drive it in european countries that view circumstances like that a little bit more favorably you might say and so i've gotten a lot of information that is new and unique about the car from this person claiming to be ohada's father and he says that he wants to sell the car for five million dollars and of course at this point i haven't gotten nearly enough information about the car to really be able to say what i thought it was worth but i said based on what i believed i knew about it i thought it was worth two million dollars and so after some back and forth and some shrewd negotiations we end up settling on two and a half million dollars for what i believe is the greatest car ever built i'm excited about that again i don't have that amount of money i don't know exactly where i'm gonna get it i'll sell most of my cars and get the biggest car loan imaginable but i'm confident that i can find some way to put that together but he claims again that his daughter's gonna be sending us pictures from wherever the car is currently being stored and i guess kind of painted and so i couldn't be any more excited and about a day later he sends me a document and he claims that this is the mexican title for the car but it's on what looks to be mclaren letterhead and the mclaren logos used the font that mclaren used in the 90s however it has the speed mark the red kind of upside down nike swoosh that mclaren uses in their branding that is a little bit of the later version so it's it's strange but again i'm just kind of glancing through an entirely spanish document the only thing that i can see very clearly is that it's somehow an invoice for about 450 000 mexican pesos which the time is about 23 000 u.s dollars now that would not be a reasonable amount to pay for an annual registration it wasn't apparently for a part or anything it wasn't for the key but and obviously it wasn't for the car and so i don't really know what it's for i sent it to some spanish-speaking friends and they're like well it does have information about a car and a client information but but it's not really a bill for anything and so again they're claiming that it's the title as i continue to look at it there's some really red flags about it uh one of the logos uses the more modern mclaren font the others use the old one it's weird okay but all right they've got something and it has the real vin of the car it was the only document that i had ever seen that had the vent of the car this is the vent that i got using the registration plate that has still been rolling around on gtr06r that if you do use a british information source that gives you the full vin it shows you the full event of zero three nine there's lots of people that have sent me these reports that well most of the mot data and the british registration data says that the brown car was repainted to yellow around 2005 and that they are the same car but o6r absolutely has a different vin they are not the same car it was not repainted 039 is still in mexico by every single report that has any teeth and so i know that that's the full vin that's what's on there but at that point they could have just gotten it from the video that i had released a few weeks prior so suspicious as it might be it's still the most intriguing thing ever because i have agreed to buy my favorite car that's ever been built and so we continue to talk a little bit but his english is pretty broke and i'm running it through google translate i'm trying to translate what i'm telling him and so it's just casual discussion until we're waiting on his daughter to get the pictures and each day there's a delay each day he promises he's gonna have him later or whatever and so finally he sends me a picture and that's where the ball kind of drops because it was obviously a mclaren f1 kit car it certainly looks like a mclaren f1 but every panel is a little bit wrong as kit cars tend to be and i'm just heartbroken because i'm like all right obviously this guy is trying to scam me but which becomes potentially a more interesting story and so i asked for more information i'm like alright well let's get some more pictures and even this one was such low resolution that it was obviously cropped out of something else and i'm like you know guys what's going on let's let's get some real picture of this car it cannot be that hard we've all got phones in our pockets with cameras on them send me what you can and so he's like all right i'm going to get you some more and of course they never come so obviously i'm kind of heartbroken because this is the red flag of all red flags certainly this is not the car it's not a real mclaren f1 that they put some kit car bumper wrongs they couldn't get a real bumper from the factory in fact it looked like one of the kit cars that a polish man named jay chuck majira and i'm sure i've said that incorrectly made about 10 years ago and he got a lot of press about it because it was a mclaren f1 looking kit car he had made lamborghini kit cars ferrari kit cars and things like that and he had garage built from scratch what looked to be a mclaren f1 ish thing and so it drove around i think he built several one of them actually used a bmw v12 and so cool whatever he had this car but you know this guy doesn't have one of the kit cars and he didn't even give me more pictures of the same kit and so regardless i know at this point all right we're not talking about a car that i really want but i still want to get as much information out of this guy as i possibly can and he keeps telling me he's going to produce more pictures and he sends me a very low resolution picture of the center console of an f1 which would have the build plaque he says there it says 039 but it doesn't say that it doesn't say anything you can't read it and so that was from a different car and so i'm getting a little bit of information and there's no real explanation about some of the inconsistencies about this document that he'd sent earlier he still claims that's the title doesn't send another thing that would be more convincing as a title so regardless i pretty much now know this is a scam and so we're going back and forth and he still says well i'm going to send you some more pictures and then he says nope i'm not going to send you any more pictures in fact i need a deposit to go any further well what kind of a deposit would you like sir and i think he wanted a couple hundred thousand dollars i said well how about fifty thousand dollars which obviously i was not gonna send he said okay but when is your mechanic going to come down and inspect it i said well where would you like him to come he says no i just want him to fly into sinaloa this airport's in kuliokan and we'll pick him up but he'll be safe we'll protect him i said oh would you okay well maybe i'll just come with him he said okay with more than merrier please come down let me know how we can wrap this thing up and i said well obviously if i was to buy this car it would be my lawyer to your lawyer escrow contingent on the car crossing the border into the u.s or you need to get it to texas and then i'll pick it up there and you'll get the money then and he's like oh no no no and you know inevitably this deal was going to be weird no matter how it ever came together but it was entertaining for me to hear exactly what he said i said well how about you send me a picture of the engine i said that's a harder thing to fake i said what you've sent me looks suspiciously like a kit car and he was only a little bit offended by that not nearly as offended as you should be if you're trying to keep up this sham but i'm asking the other guys i'm like are we all on the same page that this guy's trying to pretend that this kit car is and they're trying to save face oh i don't know what's going on maybe you know okay whatever and so he says all right i'm gonna send you a picture of the engine but that's the last thing that i'm gonna send until you send me a deposit he sends what would be like the third or fourth google image result if you were to google mclaren f1 engine and it's totally removed from a car it was actually from some detailers blog who had the honor of detailing a mclaren f1 engine certainly not the real thing came off some pinterest cache or something like that so i said all right thank you so much i appreciate your ability to search the internet for pictures that might be compelling as part of this car's case but either way i won't be sending you a deposit i won't be visiting you to inspect this kit car but thank you so much and there have been some other reports of kit cars being floating around in mexico some one on a trailer one in a warehouse and one like april fool's joke that some instagram account had composed but regardless i did not find the car and again most of the other reports had said that ojeda's son hasn't he's all grown up now he spends most of his time in new york city i made some efforts to contact him i would love to speak to him about the car most people have told me that he will never ever sell the car under any circumstance a position i certainly cannot fault because i would be in a very similar boat if i ever figured out a way to own it and so i don't think i'm all that much closer to owning it but i have certainly ruled out that as a possibility at least in the short term and so i wanted to offer that as an update we're still not exactly sure how what appears to be chassis 39 is continually re-registered in the uk tim burton schmie is going to come here sometime over the next few weeks hopefully now that he's on his us tour to tell us a little bit more about that and he's got some interesting things related to it but regardless i have so much enjoyed the chance to chase a car like this i don't know if i'll ever get to the end of that tunnel but in the meantime i'm having a whole lot of fun unfortunately i didn't get scammed as we've talked about don't let yourself be scammed on a car like this there's the car there's the title and the money nobody gets to have all three if they if you're going to pay for it make sure you're getting one or the other you got to protect yourself i run into a lot of scams and i try to protect myself and all of them but most of the time you end up just being entertained by someone's attempt to do so and so again thank you so much for watching and thank you for all the information about my favorite car and be sure to go to a place where you should not expect to be scammed to mod find it's a great enthusiast marketplace to buy and sell our favorite things about the automotive hobby parts new used oem aftermarket to our favorite cars tools cars all the things and so be sure to check them out download their app and thank them for their continued support of benwicky [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] uh

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 835,316

Rating: 4.9222274 out of 5

Keywords: ed bolian, vinwiki, mclaren f1, el chapo, el robachivas, scam, car scam, supercar, rare cars, exotic cars, mexico, sinaloa, cartel, car stories, VIN, vehicle history, kit car, replica, accident, damage, danger, investment, cars, storytelling

Id: S7pheKy5apk

Length: 15min 18sec (918 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 28 2021