Autodealer - Car Scams

There's a Good News and there's a Bad News. The Good News is that Autodealer UAE has become extremely popular among not only our visitors and members within UAE, but also among car sellers, buyers and enthusiasts from abroad. The Bad News is that we are also attracting some criminal types that are out to cheat and defraud innocent people - literally take them for a ride!

We at Autodealer have had the policy to keep it "Free for All" and keep the registration mechanism very simple. This has helped us in becoming the largest site for used cars in UAE. Some users, especially from abroad have however, started to mis-use this to post advertisements of vehicles that do not exist, are priced incorrectly or simply just to bait innocent people.

There have been certain cases where some car or motorcycle has been advertised far below the going market price, and an international phone number is provided. On calling the number, people have been told that the vehicle is abroad and they will need to make a down-payment to get the vehicle shipped. These fraudsters are professional and will give you a very professional greeting on the phone, and will also tell you that the money will be only deposited in Escrow or by a Shipping company and will not be taken until the car is delivered. DO NOT BELIEVE THIS. There are a number of similar scams that have taken place on the internet before, and you should be VERY VERY careful before sending any money to anyone abroad.

We are Autodealer do NOT take any responsibility of the advertisements posted and this is governed by our Terms of Service. We however, would like to warn against such posts and will try to make sure that they are removed as soon as they are detected. For this we require the help of you all to tell us when you find something that looks strange or suspicious. We as a community need to fight these frauds together so that we can continue to provide this Free service for everyone - the 99.99% of us all are honest users!

NEVER send money abroad without properly investigating the buyer. If you are buying from abroad, ask someone you trust over there to first go and look at the vehicle and also do the dealing for you over there. Do NOT just do it over the phone.
Search for the company or person who is selling the vehicle on the Internet (e.g. through Google search). Also search for the name of the banks, escrow companies, shipping companies that they mention. If there is anything suspicious you will probably find something on the internet explained by someone else. If you find nothing it still DOES NOT MEAN THAT THE SELLER IS LEGITIMATE, so TAKE FULL PRE-CAUTIONS.
Western Union is a payment mechanism used by many scams and frauds. The reason for this is that anyone can open a Western Union account and once the money has been sent there is no way to really track down that person. Many scams forge legitimate forms from legitimate companies and just replace the money transfer information with a Western Union account.
It is easy these days for people to build professionally looking websites and payment forms. This is used a lot for scams, phishing and other illegal activities. Just having a website does not make them legitimate.
Inform us at help-uae@autodealer.ae about the advertisers you are suspicious of. If we find the advertisement suspicious as well, we will disable it so that other users may not fall prey to it.
Describe what you see on the Discussion Forums.
Beware that there are a number of other Internet scams like credit card scams, Nigerian letter scams, cheque frauds, etc. You should be aware of these as well, as normally its done by the same fraudsters!