The Federal Trade Commission recently issued a warning about an increase in car dealer cloning.  Car dealer cloning occurs when a scammer sets up a website or social media profile as a legitimate car dealer.  The website and social media posts use images and photographs of legitimate car dealers to make them look legitimate and, with the increased availability of AI to assist the scammers in setting up their phony car dealer websites and social media presence, they appear quite legitimate.  On these phony sites the scammers offer tremendous discounts on cars.  Generally, the scammers require the purchase price for the non-existent cars to be wired to them.  Wiring funds is a favorite choice of payment of scammers because it can be difficult to reverse and is easy for the scammers to disguise their identity.

TIPS

Research any car dealer you are considering to confirm their actual phone number, email address and other contact information to make sure you are communicating with the real dealer and not a scammer posing as the legitimate dealer.  Confirm with your state Department of Transportation that the dealer with whom you are dealing is a properly registered.  Never buy a car without actually seeing and inspecting it.  Before wiring money confirm with the seller’s bank the identity of the company you are sending the funds to.  You can tell the bank that you want to verify the company’s identity before wiring funds.

Sometimes carefully checking the domain name for a counterfeit website will provide an indication that it is a scam.  If the domain name has nothing to do with the real name of the company, you can be confident that is a scam.  I would caution you however that merely because the name looks legitimate does not mean that it is.  Often scammers will create phony, but very legitimate appearing domain names.
The Google Safe Browsing Transparency Report is a terrific free service where you can type in the URL and learn if Google’s research indicates the website is a fake.  Here is a link to it. https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/search
You can also use Whois.com which is a free service that will tell you who owns a particular URL and how long it has been in service.  If your automobile dealer’s website has only been around six months and is owned by someone in Nigeria, it certainly is a scam.  Here is a link to Whois  https://whois.domaintools.com/
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