from STOC, someone "brought" an 07 plate ST.......
well well well people... I have just plucked up the courage to post this. I didn't want to tell anyone at first but realise it's best people know what is going on in the world...
I have been a victim of one of the most sophisticated car cloning fraud scams.
This is what happened to me...
I found a car on Auto Trader and made contact with the seller and organised a viewing at his house!!! (or probably wasn't his house)...
Test drove the car, checked all the docs, made an offer for the car, went home did a HPI check etc and all seemed perfectly fine.
Agreed to pay for the car by cash and take delivery on Monday, this person dropped to the car to my house and we exchanged cash and I took the little green slip off the log book (V5) as normal practice.
the car needed a road tax so I waited until my insurance certificate arrived on Thursday and went to the post office to buy my road tax. The little green log book slip would not scan so the post office suggested that I go the local DVLA office. As I work in Northampton, I went to that office where they decided to inspect the car.
At that point I was a little stressed to say the least and the DVLA staff ripped up the carpet on the drivers side where a new VIN Number plate was stuck over the original VIN plate.
Basically I thought I had a bought an 07 Car and this was a 56 car which was stolen on 17th June. The car I had got had been cloned as a duplicate of another car already in the UK with the same VIN Number etc hence the HPI check all went through fine. I was actually HPI checking the wrong car. ...
These are proper sophisticated people as the vehicle documents were produced on legitimate DVLA paper so obviously there is some inside dodgy stuff going on.
Please be careful.
