Buying A Car Threw Escrow... Whats The Go?

[chef_stagea]

this isnt to do with skylines im sorry lol...

but dads found a car (bmw x3 very homo i know) he likes in queensland, and the person doesnt want to deal face to face. shes given it to escrow??

its to do with ebay. heres what shes said.

I send them the name and address of the person receiving the car.

They then send the invoice for payment to the buyer.

The buyer makes payment to eBay for the vehicle and confirms it with

eBay.

eBay then informs the buyer when the delivery of the car will be done

and delivers the car.

The buyer then has 3 days inspection time, during which he can decide

if he keeps the vehicle or not.

If you do not want to keep the vehicle eBay will refund you and take

the car back to the warehouse.

If you want to keep the vehicle, they will help with the transfer of

registration etc and then they will release the funds to me.

has any one got any experience with this way of car sales b4? the car is also a few grand below market value...

[M I K E]

i find it a little strange that the person doesn't want to deal face to face.. surely your dad would want to go and check it out in person, adam?

escrow services are like a middle man for larger sales, they take payment for an item from the buyer (for a fee) and hold it until the buyer receives the item and ok's it at which point the money is released to the seller

if they are using the recommended ebay escrow service it should be sweet, but i still don't know why you wouldn't want to get the car checked out?

on a slightly different tangent, this is a bloody funny read related to escrow and scammers http://www.zug.com/pranks/powerbook/

[typevu]

Doesnt want to meet face to face = very suss... see car first, money later.

[M I K E]

i mean the way she's written that out, it says the car gets delivered and you have 3 days inspection time and if you don't like it then they send the car back. she's either really confident you'll buy it or a complete moron if you there is a chance that you won't buy it... does she think that they'll ship the car around the country for free?

[cosmic starz]

Mike has explained how escrow works very well - it provides both seller and buyer with a high degree of security so neither is ripped off

and there are many reasons why seller wants to remain 'at arms lenght' from buyer - it isn'y necessarily suss at all - if you have had the experience of the dreamers and time wasters, esp if its a BMW (even an old bomb BMW only about useful for parts) you get a very interesting cross-section of people but mostly dreamers and clowns, and then there is the sms from people with sign-offs like samoangangstabro - lol - you would really want to meet up with him for his test drive in your car not - lol

[chef_stagea]

yeah i no what ya mean... but its a bmw thats done 40,000ks wd b unlikely ne major dramas would have occourd.... on the other hand i said it soulds like u have 3 days cooling off to find whats shagged on the car n after than unlucky... if u find it we'll suck sum1 eles in. i emailed ebay motors with the girls ID numebr n there like nup its in melbourne in a holding yard, its not a show room, we just do the transaction. its same as ebay buyer beware... bit hard to when theres a bmw up forsale... like what could go wrong....? but if it did theres heaps of coin down the drain.

[mrgtt]

hrmm sounds like a scam ive came across this before aswell, there was a car for sale in adelaide a 350z for liek 15grand i sent him a few emails and he replied saying hes overseas but cars with escrow then after a few sus emails i said id rather wait till he comes back from over seas then he simply replied back the car is sold found it abit strange so i used a different email to ask about the car and he said still for sale and said the escrow shit so be very carefull.

[cosmic starz]

+1

------------------------you definitely need to be extra careful whenever buying or sharing personal info on net etc -----------------add to my earlier post , when I was getting the samoanganstabro and the myriad of middle eastern persona based enquiries, - yes!!!!!!!! 90%+ were either pacific islanders or mid eastern- most of which had not bothered to properly read the advt or wanted a luxo car for nothing, I too would just spin them off by saying car is sold or currently in use call back in 3 months etc - I am sure some contacted me again next few days day thru a proxy to make a new "offer", and we went thru the whole thing again

one really weird case was a email from someone with an Aussie email sign off name but who wrote his emails in like you would expect from a very amateur Russian using a english /russian coversion dictionary resulting in really bad/out of date expression terms and sentence construction, and this the sphincter of the universe's sole ploy was to try everything to get me to register an EBAY account and give him the details as he supposedly wanted to do a direct deposit to pay full price for the car - an older BMW Coupe , when queried he claimed he was Australian and currently in the Bermudas working on a ship as the reason for not even wanting to see the car - I thought yea Bermuda triangle more likely, so I ask him you give me your EBAY account details first and he had every excuse not to - so after playing this game via about a dozen emails to and fro I terminated him (like all other clowns) by putting an email block on him etc

maybe at some point he was hoping to elicit more personal/banking info from me - seemed a very every odd encounter.

has anyone experienced a scam based on seller giving out EBAy account details or if not just be aware of this possibility ?

[Jase]

as pointed out above, scammers use escrow quite a bit

doesn't mean its a scam though but

i would be pretty wary

be careful man

Edited June 8, 2009 by Jase