Car scam. Sellers beware!

Closing up our Stockholm house, I’ve been selling things on the local version of Craig’sList. Many items sell in the first day, even in the first hour after an ad goes live. Most buyers don’t try to bargain; they simply pay the asking price. Sure, that’s partly the Swedish character. Pricing items low has a lot to do with it, too.

After success with many items, I decide to list our car, a 15-year-old Saab in almost-new condition with only 83,000 miles and not a thing wrong with it.

The phone rings a few minutes after the ad is posted. The caller wants the car! He makes a half-hearted attempt to lower the price and Bob, who has taken the call, agrees to the little discount. The caller says he’s in Uppsala, a nearby university town, and it will take him a little more than an hour to drive down with a friend. Okay. The caller asks for explicit driving directions, and Bob gives it. The caller tells us to take the ad offline, since he’s coming to get the car. Bob says sure and finally hangs up.

Car Scam!

Bob relates all this to me and I become a little testy. What do you mean you agreed to a discount? Of course I’m not going to take the ad down! Not until I’ve actually sold the car. And who calls to say they’ll buy the car sight-unseen, instead of saying they’ll come take a look at it?

Several minutes later, I get an email from “Joel,” who writes that it sounds like a good deal, when can he come see the car? I tell Joel that we have buyers on the way, but come tomorrow morning unless I write that it’s been sold.

Uppsala guy calls again. He’s driving, and in a chatty mood. He asks Bob endless personal questions. Overhearing Bob’s replies, alarm bells begin to toll in my head. The guy asks for driving directions again. Bob gives him turn-by-turn instructions. It sounds as if they’re close, since Bob is naming nearby streets and landmarks. They couldn’t be here already, all the way from Uppsala.

Anyway, what kind of people don’t have GPS nowadays, I’m wondering. Why are they asking for the same simple directions over and over? It occurs to me that they’re simply tying up the phone line, trying to prevent competing buyers from getting through.

The Uppsala guy and his friend arrive. They couldn’t have driven all the way from Uppsala so quickly. Bob goes outside to show them the car. I observe from the upstairs window like a suspicious witch.

The man is about 26, I’m guessing, and my first thought: he’s the son or husband of one of the hundreds of beggars parked on the pavements of Stockholm. Nope, I have no evidence of that; it just pops into my head.

It’s dark and below freezing outside. An icy wind numbs my face at the open window. They’re speaking Swedish below. Long conversations. Wild gesticulating. Brief looks inside the car and under the hood. The guy from Uppsala starts the engine and complains about the look of the exhaust, but he never asks to drive the car. Meanwhile, the friend’s SUV is idling.

Bob tramps upstairs. “The car has a ton of problems! It’s a year older than you claim in your ad. The odometer has been rolled back. It’s had ten owners before us. And there’s water in the oil. He made a low offer, but I think we should take it.”

I explode. “Why do you believe him? He’s a scammer!”

“He showed me the car’s history on a website.”

“Right—on his smartphone! His phone with internet and GPS and maps. Why do you think he kept you on the phone for 20 minutes asking excruciating details about how to get here? He just wanted to keep the phone busy so you couldn’t take any other calls!”

“Let’s take it. Saab’s bankrupt, the car might not sell at all.”

“It’s the first day! The first hour! And I already have another interested person. A guy who wants to see the car before he buys it.”

“I’ll try to get the price up a little then…”

“No. In fact, forget that discount you agreed to on the phone. For this guy, the price has just gone up. Full price in cash, or nothing.” I am a witch.

Bob goes back downstairs disappointed. The witch put in the ad, photographed the car, and therefore gets final word on the sale. The SUV has been idling all this time. Ready for a quick get-away? Foul fumes float into my face at the window. The scammer persists and keeps Bob in negotiation for another 15 minutes before he finally speeds off.

I email Joel and tell him the sale didn’t go through. He comes over immediately to look at the car, test drives it, asks to see its “besiktiningar,” an official document showing any work done prior to the car’s last registration. Joel tells me the car is a great deal at the asking price, and buys it. He pays cash.

Sold, in under two hours.

And the next day Joel returns to help us with an errand for which we need a car. We did not expect the car to sell so quickly. Nice guy, Joel.

I wonder how Uppsala guy would have paid, had we made a deal. Just guessing: he’d flash cash, but not enough—oh, sorry, that’s all I could get from the cash machine—then offer to pay more than the agreed price via PayPal—a phony account. Or… no. Why then, bother to negotiate at all? Because by then, we’d be convinced we’d never sell the car, it’s such a mess. Or is he a “short-changer” who knows how to fold cash to make it look like more than it is? This part, we’ll never know.

Most interesting: what happened to Bob’s scam-sensor? Why did he fall for this con artist’s story? Okay, the scammer must have been smooth. (They all are.) He was prepared with fake “evidence.” And we’d dealt with so many honest buyers before this one. And Swedes are pretty decent, on the whole. Bob’s guard was down. Yeah. Excuses, excuses. Reminder: we can all be taken. Stay alert!