The Scams you need to be Alert to when you put up an Old Car for Sale
My friend from a small town near New York tried to put her 2003 Saturn on the market herself with ads in the classifieds recently. The most unpleasantness that she expected to come across was a couple of buyers who haggled too hard. It turned out her old car for sale ad opened her eyes to a whole new side to society she had never known about - perverts, weirdos and con-artists. There was one who offered to pay her more than she asked for, if he could pick up the car in 15 minutes. His request (and the accent) sounded so much like the terrorists behind the Times Square car bomb that she quickly hung up. In the end, her old car fetched her $7500, about $2000 more than what the dealer offered her.
Buying or selling an old car through a private party transaction rather than through a business, is often an invitation to criminal types to come and have a go at the opportunity. When you try to buy a car through a private transaction, you could get people selling you cars that have had all the good parts stripped out and substituted with bad ones, you could have a car with the odometer rolled back, the ownership papers forged, and you could have kerbstoning - where the dealer comes trying to sell you a car while he pretends he's an individual seller.
And if you are offering an old car for sale, you could have a phony check or one that bounces. You could also have the Nigeria scam pulled on you trying to sell a car. They mail you a fake certified check for twice the price you are charging, tell you that they made a mistake, and ask you to wire back to them the excess cash. The hope is that you'll send them the cash even before your bank tries to collect on the check and finds out that the check is fake.
Yet another common situation involves the fake escrow. An escrow service is a mediating party. They take money from a buyer and hold on to it until he tells them that he's satisfied with the goods he has received, and puts out his okay for the release of the money to the seller. You'll see a lot of this in real estate and Internet selling. When you try to sell a car, buyers can come up with a fake escrow service though ; the service will tell you that it has received payment for the car when it hasn't. And when you let the car buyer drive it away, you realize that there is no payment and no escrow service.
Some bad things can happen when you take the DIY approach to posting an old car for sale. But your savings can be pretty good too when things go smoothly; most of the time, they do. Let's look at how to avoid some of the worst things that can happen when you grow your own.
1. Make sure that you don't call the buyer home; if he happens to be a criminal, you will end up setting yourself squarely in his sights. And wherever you go to sell a car, make sure that you bring a friend along who is noted for his strength.
2. Make sure that you pick your own escrow service, so that you can avoid fraudulent ones.
3. Before you actually let the car go, make sure that all the documentation is in order.
According to the law, any old car for sale that actually gets sold needs to be reported to the DMV and the insurance company. Several states allow you a release of liability - so that should the buyer hit somebody with the car you sold him, right after the sale, you can prove that the car should not be counted as yours in the event of an accident. The fact that you can detach yourself from anything that happens to your car once it leaves your possession, is something that wins a lot of car owners a great deal of peace mind.