<p>Ok so I ranted on the rant thread about our faked Carfax experience and there were a few comments including private messages so let’s chat about this, you my esteemed fellow earthlings, who occasionally need to purchase gravity bound vehicles with your 20 something year olds along for the intensive learning experience.</p>
<p>Here’s what happened.</p>
<p>1) Son had lousy car suitable for the short back and forth to high school.
2) Son goes to college; car sits in the dirt for months at a time.
3) Son gets fab internship and needs a commuter car.<br>
4) Family caucus called by mom who demands safer vehicle. Debate (ahem) ensues.
5) Family agrees to search for vehicle.
6) The long hard work of car looking takes place. Family wanders car lots in various 100ish degree days of weather, shaking hands with and being chatted up by very nice nice nice salespeople who use every tactic to get us to enter the air conditioned sanctuary of the showroom where we are encouraged to stay stay stay and view the lovely expensive new cars which we could not / would not afford.
7) Family mines the internet searching for the right car. Various portions of family drive various cars at various prices as safety, price, style, brand start to converge toward the illusive concept of “what do you want and at what price?”
8) Family finds one good one near home and mom and pop toodle on down to screen it for son who is at work. Nice car! Nice salesman! Not too much pressure! AND he happens to have another car on the lot (start the music we should have heard at this point?) of the type we are looking for. Great! Do you have the Carfax? Yes indeedy he nicely prints it out for us while we test drive it. Fabulous!
9) Next night Son and Pop toodle down to the place and compare the two cars and LO! The second car is just right. They plop down the credit card - long hard process done - WHEW. Until:
10) Mom (the next morning) is double checking price/value online - last few clicks of due diligence kind of thing, when she clicks the internet version of the carfax on this car. Hey what’s this? COLLISION DAMAGE. Huh? Looks like the printed out version the salesman provided was conveniently CLEANSED of this info. Otherwise the two reports are identical. Dang and double dang.
11) Family caucus. Could this really be happening? Yes indeedy.
12) Call the credit card company; call the slimebucket and cancel the sale; yadda yadda.
13) Post on CC !!!</p>
<p>14) Let the record show we did purchase another fine vehicle from a reputable dealer near home.</p>
<p>So I ask you, fellow earth bound creatures who have to purchase travel mechanisms on occasion. HOW would you handle the subsequent shellacing of this salesman?</p>
<p>DMD77 posted that this is fraud and should be reported to the police; we have debated this in my family. Is this in fact illegal? Or is it just a lesson in buyer beware? I mean, how easy is it to computer cut and paste, you know?</p>
<p>I plan to contact the BBB, have told my mechanic and friends, will post on FB, and will contact Carfax because they surely don’t want their product reliability besmirched.</p>
<p>I would check with the police to find out if there is anything that can be done. You might also check to see if there are reviews of this place on yelp and post your own…I had an issue with a local gym recently and when I couldn’t get satisfaction I told them that I would use every power in my means to “rain hell upon their business” up to and including the police, posting on the internet about their illegal practices, going to the police and standing in front of their business with a sign. (Checked with my attorney on the legality of that and got the green light). They had my check the next day
Lucky for you that the wife found the real carfax. Jeesh.</p>
<p>I have never purchased a used car or used Carfax. Is there a way to let Carfax know, so they can warn folks to do exactly what you did run your OWN report.</p>
<p>I’d try to contact CarFax. I don’t know how they deliver their reports but I assume that it’s in electronic format and electronic documents can be edited.</p>
<p>Tututaxi, Carfax would love that advice- since it will cost you 35 bucks apiece to to run a report. I just finished a dispute with Carfax- they said the car I was trying to sell had been in an accident in which the airbags were deployed, which lowered the value by 2000 bucks. I have been the sole owner of this car, and know that the airbags never deployed. It took me 3 months and a lot of legwork to get them to change the erroneous report, and of course, I had to pay them to get the report in the first place. So it’s kind of win-win for them.</p>
<p>I seriously doubt the police or the AG will be interested in pursuing this. It would involve a lot of work on their part with no hard evidence. Carfax should be very interested. This is a good reminder to everyone to run their own carfax and not rely on a report produced by the seller. Also, Carfax is not perfect; repairs/accidents sometimes are not reported to them.</p>
<p>NJres, the police will not be interested in pursuing this, however, investigation of fraud is one of the things that Attorney General’s office are supposed to handle. HugCheck, do report this to your AG’s Fraud investigation Department.</p>
<p>I’d also warn others by posting reviews on Yelp, Yahoo , etc.</p>
<p>^^Awesome suggestion. Many TV stations do this kind of reporting. For example, our local station, KING5, employes a special reporter who goes after crooks, deadbeat contractors, etc. I love to watch their *Get Jessie *segment.</p>
<p>Before accusing the salesman of fraud, contact car fax. It could very well be that the car fax that includes a collision report is wrong. When we traded in our last vehicle (we bought it new and were the sole owners), the dealer ran the car fax on it and it said that the car had been in an accident in a totally different part of the country than where we live. As it stood, the dealer was going to knock off $1800 from our trade value. I took the info, went home, and played detective.</p>
<p>After reading through every detail of the full car fax (we paid extra to get the full report), I discovered that the car on the car fax that was supposed to be for my blue highlander, was really for a green highlander. Car fax had entered the vin number data wrong into the system and it somehow got tied to my vehicle. Anyway, I emailed them and put “Emergency-ASAP” in the subject line. I explained everything and told them that I needed the report corrected within 48 hours because I was trading the car into the dealer for a new vehicle. Long story short, they corrected everything (of course, I had to pay for another car fax report with the corrected info). I brought the corrected car fax to the dealer and he gave us the full trade in value for our vehicle because in truth, our vehicle had never been in an accident.</p>
<p>I also think this is fraud because he took your credit card so that shows intent. A lawyer could direct you here. First, I would call the manager of the entire dealership and talk with that person and find out just how this is percieved by them.</p>
<p>We had a somewhat similiar thing happen a couple of years ago. I am fuzzy on the details but I think the salesman said it was clean but for some reason he did not give us a copy of the carfax so when I got home I ran one and the car had been in an accident. I also found out it had been a lease in Hawaii. Called my friend in the car business and was told never to purchase a car that had a life near saltwater. They cal them “pineapples” as the salt corrodes the engines.
I did get angry with the saleman. We had not paid as I had an intuition that we were being pushed too hard and too fast. I did get a call from his manager but I did not go any farther. Again, in your case you had a hard copy from him so I think it is more serious.</p>
<p>In California I think I’d probably start with reporting it to the DMV who I think does some licensing of dealers. Outside of that I might try the state AG as others have said or maybe the police as well.</p>
<p>I doubt the BBB would be of much use from what I’ve read about the BBB. Even if you did report it to them - did you consult the BBB before buying a car from this dealer? Probably not.</p>
<p>I’ve never used Carfax and wouldn’t put much faith in it even if it was legit. It’s kind of like some feedback sites - it can sometimes tell you some objective facts about things that have happened to the car but it can’t tell you a comprehensive history of the car. I can guarantee Carfax doesn’t know the history of my cars. Just because you don’t see something on Carfax doesn’t mean something negative didn’t happen (how’s that for a lot of negatives in one sentence?). Of course in your case the legit one actually did show something negative which would have been useful.</p>
<p>Was there no issue returning the car to the dealer?</p>
<p>I don’t think it would be unreasonable to contact the fraud unit at the police department in the city where the dealer is located. My guess is that you weren’t the first family they attempted to scam, and while you were “made whole” via the refund, filing a report would help create a track record that might be useful if this emerges as a pattern. I’d also do the yelp thing – I look at that more often than the BBB, which at least in our area seems to be more interested in setting up hoops for consumers to jump through than to really trying to identify bad actors.</p>
<p>NYsmile and ucsd<em>ucla</em>dad, that’s the problem w/ Carfax. They can say whatever they want, and it’s up to you to disprove it if they’re wrong. They told me I needed the police report from a fender bender in 2004 to prove the airbags didn’t go off. There was no mention of airbags in the report, but Carfax said that wasn’t good enough-they wanted it to say the airbags were not deployed.</p>
