eBay Motors Scam - Muscle Car Buyer Beware!

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Fall for an eBay Motors scam? Not us we thought, but the excitement you feel when you find your muscle car - exactly the one you're looking for - can obviously override your intelligence.

We added it to our Watch List to see if the bidding would put the car out of our reach. The Buy It Now price was very low but if someone bids lower than the Buy It Now price on eBay, the Buy It Now option disappears and the bidding begins. Since we'd been into buying a car on eBay for a few months, we were sure the car would be gone in a flash.

Here's the car that was listed. Isn't she a beauty?

The eBay Motors Auction We Saw

The next day we checked and no one had bid for the car. We reviewed the detailed photos in the eBay item description again. The Buy It Now price was less than the cost of the engine that was in the lovely blue Dart and it was within our budget. The decision was made, let's buy it!

The "seller" had set up the auction so a potential buyer had to get pre-approval before bidding. We followed the instructions to notify the seller that we wanted to bid. Within an hour, there was a response saying they had notified eBay to allow us to buy the car and to follow the instructions from eBay to proceed.

The response was very clever, saying that it was the seller's husband's car and that he had recently died. The car was a source of sore memories and she wanted a speedy transaction. Yes, the eBay Motors scam comes complete with a muscle car lover's sob story. The location of the Dart was on the opposite coast but the extremely low Buy It Now price included shipping directly to our home. Awesome! We were worried about how to get the car to our house once the transaction was completed.

Soon we got an email that certainly looked like it came from eBay saying Congratulations - You are approved to buy!

It also gave instructions to send half of the winning price to an individual in Detroit via MoneyGram (similar to Western Union). Once the vehicle was delivered, we would pay the other half.

Here's what the email looked like. You can see that it has exactly the same logos and everything to make us believe it was from eBay.

Here's the fake email sent as part of the eBay Motors scam.

KB and I were both at work and couldn't touch base to chat about which bank account to take the cash from so we could send the MoneyGram. Luckily, we never hooked up or we would be telling a very different story!

Late that afternoon, CB finally got time to re-read the instructions on how to pay for our Dart. Checking the original listing of the car on eBay to make sure that we had the usual 72 hours to make the initial payment, CB suddenly noticed a tip for buying a car on eBay on the right side of the page. Here's what it said:

The Very Important eBay Motors Safety Tip!

If you look back at the graphic of the email supposedly from eBay, the text of the tip is completely opposite from this one. With a sinking feeling, we went to eBay Help pages for further information. There in black and white was a full description of this exact eBay motors scam that we had almost fallen for! We notified eBay and the car auction was immediately pulled.

You'd like to think this would be the end of that person's crooked dealings but just a few days later a similar listing appeared. For kicks, we asked a co-worker to send an email offer to purchase the car on eBay using the Buy It Now feature. Sure enough, he received an email saying the car was her deceased husband's....

The eBay Motors scam lives on regardless of the efforts of eBay's very responsive security department!

We are so thankful that we weren't victimized and highly recommend reading eBay Motors Safe Buying Tips before you decide to buy a car on eBay motors.

It's pretty embarrassing to say we almost fell for that eBay Motors scam now that we look back on it. Hopefully our experience will keep you from making a sad mistake. That's what our whole website is about, helping you find your muscle car, the best way possible.

Did this keep us from buying a car on eBay Motors?

No. We ended up purchasing our dream car from a seller three states away. It was a very successful, satisfactory purchase. Click here to learn about our dream car purchase on eBay Motors.