Beware of the Fake Vehicle Escrow Service Scam!
Late last week I was contacted by one of our clients (let’s call her “Judy”).
Judy had been looking at buying a new car and found the perfect one for sale on Marketplace. She did a search on the value of the car, and discovered that the asking price was somewhat lower than the usual asking price for that make and model of car and so Judy thought she’d found a great bargain and contacted the seller via email (as directed by the seller).
The seller sent Judy an email giving her a run down on the car and said that due to their experience selling during COVID, that they were now going through a third party company called escrow.com.
The way ESCROW operates sounds a bit like Paypal, in that Judy makes the payment to Escrow and the car gets delivered to her once the payment is received. Not only that, once the car has been delivered, Judy has 5 days to decide if the car is suitable or not and if not, Judy can send the car back at the sellers expense.
Judy had never heard of ESCROW and so she did a Google search and they seem legit, but something about the transaction rings an alarm bell, particularly as the asking price was somewhat lower than the usual asking price for that make and model of car and also the seller could only be contacted via email. Judy didn’t want to get ripped off so she contacted me to see if I’d heard anything about ESCROW.
It smelt a little off to me as well, and so I offered to put my feelers to a group of colleagues and I found out that it is most definitely a scam. Judy’s emails from the “seller” were pretty well textbook in the way the scam works.
Obviously, Judy did NOT purchase the car.