How to Spot Facebook Marketplace Scam ads for Cars!

Facebook marketplace is more of a scamming portal than a trading one these days, so what can you look out for to avoid being next? I made enquiries on some scam ads and learned some tips and tricks to stop you becoming their next victim

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They are everywhere Facebook scam ads for cars that you will never own and last year more than 65,000 people lost over 35 million pounds on them I’ve been keeping an eye on these scams for the last couple of months and they’re much more complicated than you’d think so

Stay tuned and we’re going to have a look over on Facebook Marketplace find some scam ads and go down the rabbit hole obviously not sending any money over but it will teach you a lot about how to avoid being Facebook’s next victim that’s quite amusing the corser

That’s on its side but I’ve chosen London as my location because everything London is a scam anyway um and let’s see what we can find it is not going to take very long at all if we change it to something like a car that everyone wants a cash

Car okay so first thing that comes up straight away definite scam ad now there are a couple of things that tell you it’s a scam ad obviously the price is too good to be true because no one is going to be selling a 2016 cash Kai for

Two grand however some of the things that you can look for are who is selling it so this person Michael lwell if you click him he will have loads and loads of cars listed and they’re all in London that brings me on to another point so

You can tell if a car is a scammer because does it fit in with the place that the pictures taken so obviously we know this guy’s in central London so is he likely to be taking pictures of a van on a road like this does that look like

Central London no it does not and another thing that you should look for as well is number plates that start with s now in general I don’t buy cars that start with s because they are cars that are registered in Scotland and therefore they are all rusty and it doesn’t really

Matter how old it is anything from 2015 back is going to be in a pretty bad condition if it’s from Scotland that’s what you should be checking for if you live down in Cornwall and someone’s selling cars a little like that the chances are that you know it’s come a

Long way it’s not likely and the price just doesn’t make sense anyway that leads me on to another point which is how does the scam work so this guy was not actually quite following the pattern of the normal scams because his adverts weren’t the same but what is a really

Popular term is leans and I’ll just show you quickly what that is so here we go this Prius whatever it doesn’t matter what it is they’re all have the same thing um so here we’ve got it says low mileage excellent on electric um blah BL blah blah but if you look everything is

In list form that is a common uh theme of this particular scam it all comes in list form doesn’t mention the mileage because it’s all copy and pasted takes too much effort won’t mention theot um but what it will say is I always keep it in a garage no rust no dents original

Paint no accident and clean title well we don’t have titles we don’t have a clean title we’re not America we’ll just say if it’s a cat car or not and always this one says without any leens or encumbrances which no one knows what that means no writ that in an advert so

And then it will always put some hashtags that make no difference um that is a really really popular thing and these accounts are all compromised um so if we click this guy he will have loads and loads of them listed yeah you know people don’t sell 2021

Yarus for three grand but people buy this people go for this so if you inquire on one of these you will receive a message back that says something along the lines of I’m selling the car well sometimes you get I’m selling the car for my aunt and other times you will get

We’re a Transport company it belongs to us and this is the next part of the scam that I’m going to show you now I’ve just s showed to my other laptop cuz it has my emails on it but I just wanted to quickly illustrate to you uh the point I

Was trying to make about number place and things like that so here’s a cash Kai that is listed up for sale in London it starts with L which is the code for London and it looks like it could be taken in London because it’s that kind of industrial sort

Of London is kind of looking place however if you go through it you can see here that it says these are taken from Falcon is it Falcon I don’t know I’m too blind to actually read that but it’s taken from some Trader page and if you carry on very helpfully it tells you

Where the pictures were taking because they’ve left the SAT now screen on and it shows you that it’s somewhere up around Manchester sort of way so if you live in Chelsea which apparently is where this person is you’ve gone to a car garage in Manchester to take pictures of your

Car again like I said look out for this H listing thing it does not mention anything specific about the car so even though um they are listing it as a car and it looks like it could be in London and it’s on the right kind of number

Plates for the area and for a car it’s only a few years old it’s completely plausible that it might not have left London it still doesn’t add up and you can also see no one’s going to be paying or selling a 29 cash C for 6,785 quid there was one account that uh

Came up recently that had something like2 million pound of cars wor uh worth of cars list on it and Facebook don’t take them down they don’t do anything about it and then when you get scammed they don’t even reply to you let’s move on to the next part of the scam so if

You email these people which is what I did you will get the following response and this company that they claim that they are now no longer exists and I can’t get completely how that Wass I think what happens is they go on company’s house they find a way to

Hijack a company and then get you to send money to a different bank account that they’ve hijacked from somewhere else so if you look on company’s house for the filings for these companies there is a certain code that company’s house will give to a company when it is

Under attack or something like that so some of the companies um I’ve done this on two different accounts and one of them did one of them didn’t so it depends if company’s house is caught on but that’s another thing if anyone gives you a name of a company check it out a

Lot of these they advertise and they make themselves look like private sellers but then you’re going to pay the money to a company that’s not a car dealership I’ll come on to that because what will happen is you will make your inquiry and they will say we are a

Transport company and what we do is we transport Vehicles across the place but we don’t sell them but we bought it from auction and you can’t view it because it’s in a container so I came up with the first idea when I did this I said

They asked my address and I said that I lived about $5 down from the address that they’ given me earlier on therefore I had reasonable things say well why are you going to ship it to me just send me out the car sorry I’ll just turn up and

Pick the car so you don’t have to send it to me I got the response back from the guy and they will phone you they’ve got proper phone numbers and they will call you up and he said um oh well uh it’s it’s from an auction

We we’ve not got it delivered yet so we will get the auction company to send it straight to you um even though they don’t buy and sell CS but they clearly must have an account with an auction house um again so it’s just more stuff

It doesn’t add up let me come on to the email chain so I started this and this will show you how sophisticated this is these are some of the emails that we um went through and they said I started it off got the first email

Um I said hello blah blah blah I used a fake name and everything um and I said right how do you want me to pay and they said the easiest and fastest way is online banking that’s what they wanted me to do and they gave

Me this account and sort number now I am sharing this because these are bank accounts that are fraudulently um taken over so they should actually be shut down by now I said right well you know that go Barbers sounds like a barber shop why is that

Not in your name and then I got that’s an escrow bank account which I don’t we don’t do escrow here I don’t think the way it sounds very American to me so anyway they gave me their escrow bank account for some unknown reason and I said well I tried Googling them nothing

Comes up I’m not sending to any money to you because I don’t know who I’m sending it to They carried on at this point and will ring you um that’s that again that’s another point they have sort of quite a sophisticated operation going on although the guy was Indian and sounded

Like he was in an airon cupboard um the escar account yes you must send it here um and then that gives you the 5-day money back testing period so I went all right yeah fine yeah I’ll send that over this afternoon but then I thought I’m

Going to throw a spanner in the works um by asking them for a picture of the service hist Street and then they said no not going to send you that because we keep all of that stuff in the car and it’s in a container and it’s sealed up

And so I said I’d like to see them first and then they didn’t get back to me so you know they’re prepared to work for it and it’s not like the old days where if you get scammed you get scam for a deposit they now want to scam you for

The full value of the car that doesn’t exist so in this case it was a 2017 mini Countryman I would have lost five grand and people do I’ve seen people put posts up saying I fell for this scam they had me hookline and sinker and I lost all my

Money so what happens is you send the money to that company and then before you know it’s transferred out to Legos or somewhere and it’s gone and they will just keep taking over these accounts find another one start this up again and the cycle continues moving on from that

Point though what can really get you is the contracts they are pretty well written there are a couple of things though that didn’t quite um pass the ey of me which were uh it gave you a guarantee here for uh that vehicles that don’t that aren’t covered

By their money back policy whatever crap it is um are not covered if their value is less than $150,000 so I think that’s something to bear in mind um but again you know if you’ve got this far in you might already just think no uh think nothing

Of it then they give you some numbers and some emails and they they don’t work now um but they did and I found the director of this company um on Facebook and it seems like he is just a normal guy and they’ve taken over his company that happens that is how the scam

Happens now I’ll tell you what happens if you send your money to them so I phoned up Barkley’s because I did this on a second account and the account that sent bar and I said I’ve got scam I know what’s going on I’m making a video on

This for YouTube and I want to know what you’re going to do about this account they basically said because I’d sent no money they weren’t going to do anything about it so unless you send over 5,000 Barclay will do nothing in which time of course your money’s gone they aren’t

Going to get it back for you because you sent it by a bank transfer so you have no protection so bear that in mind I think is the lesson and I don’t know know what Facebook are going to do about this this is clearly a problem that has

Been infecting the platform for a long time also makes it really difficult to use I use Facebook to make money and I can’t I can spend hours and hours looking for ads and they will be scam ads and they go across the whole range of cars they used to only have these ads

In London they are now all over the country and they will go on cars even Classics like a fear x19 can be from Leons and incumbrances and I don’t know how they’re doing it and I assume it’s all automated and it’s just Bots that make these accounts but you have to keep

Your wit about you because if you send your money over you will lose it and I will now share with you a time when I got scammed so I lost 4 grand once and I found a car that I liked it was for sale

On eBay it was a white it was like a 2014 for Fiesta and I won it on the bids or I didn’t win it actually but I they said I messaged them or something like that and said if the buyer falls through anyway buyer fell through and I went up

To Basildon and collected my Fiesta and when I was making the inquiries about what sort of paperwork was with the car they sent me over a picture of the service history and all that jazz so I went up there bought the car I said oh where’s the service history he’s like oh

My brother’s at work it’s his car I’m just meeting you here to sell it for him and um he’ll post it over because I’d already seen a picture of the service history I knew it was real and it corresponded with the mileage and everything on the car which is more be

Said for these idiots so I carried on I gave him the money I paid him in cash and then I drove the car back home and don’t know more of it I then rang the guy up because I had his number and he said to me well nothing his phone was

Disconnected so I at that point started to think something was wrong and I pulled back the um flooring to have a look at the VIN numbers and they had been covered in UND seal and the rest of the car had had clone VIN numbers made up it had fake dealer number plates from

A different dealer and how I found out that I’ve been scanned was there was an advert for it on autot Trader that I’d seen at the same time as Ebay listing and when I couldn’t get hold of the number that I was given when I was

Trying to say are you going to post a service history yet I phone up the number on auto trader and I said hi I bought your car I see your had still up I just want to know what’s going on about sending the servic his tree he

Said well my car’s still on the drive they’ve reported it to the dvla and the police that someone called up a few days earlier asking them for pictures of their log book and everything else and they’d sent it over and it was only when they spoke to a friend who was a car

Dealer he was like you should not have done that so they informed the police and the DV and the dvla did nothing to block that log book apparently the dv’s excuse was that they don’t need to thanks very much really helped save me getting scammed so I lost all my money

The police came to sees the car and I never saw any of it again so there you go ACC CH on scams it can happen to anyone it happened to me and uh I’m still sort of recovering from that now anyway thanks for watching the video it

Was a little bit different to usual this is questionable car club I hope you enjoyed it and I will see you around for the next video please remember to like And subscribe and keep your money safe