Monroe, Washington, car eval.

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Kevin,

Really sorry to hear that this turned out to be a scam. I was hoping that it was going to be the real deal for you.

this kind of thing makes everyone in the hobby sick as well. Hope you are able to work with Ebay to get your money back.

Jim

 
Did you notice the rear seat interior panels have the holes for the retractable seat belts, not on '71's...
Even though the car was used as part of a scam this time, that was a good catch on the rear seat interior panels.  The Fast Lane site says the restore was done in he mid to late 1990's, so I guess their best shot was a set of the '73 panels.  If someone wanted to get fancy they could have cut small patches from a bad donor panel and affixed them in some manner prior to spraying the panels.  Awesome car though- wish the true owner would step forward and join the site if they are even aware of it.

 
Kevin,

Really sorry to hear that this turned out to be a scam. I was hoping that it was going to be the real deal for you.

this kind of thing makes everyone in the hobby sick as well. Hope you are able to work with Ebay to get your money back.

Jim
Thanks Jim. I'll keep everyone posted on the progress with Ebay insurance. Looking good so far. Thank God I insisted the guy do the transaction through Ebay. If I had bought the car outside of Ebay or on Craigslist there would be zero chance of getting my money back.

 
Kevin,

Really sorry to hear that this turned out to be a scam. I was hoping that it was going to be the real deal for you.

this kind of thing makes everyone in the hobby sick as well. Hope you are able to work with Ebay to get your money back.

Jim
Thanks Jim. I'll keep everyone posted on the progress with Ebay insurance. Looking good so far. Thank God I insisted the guy do the transaction through Ebay. If I had bought the car outside of Ebay or on Craigslist there would be zero chance of getting my money back.
I'm intrigued by the bogus Washington State document as the title evidence.   Surely rates up there with counterfeit passports & fake driver's licences.

I would have thought that Government departments would be interested in the fraudulent use of their logo, bar code & numbering structure etc.

And the ability to alter the images of those old door tag numbers.   Who do you trust ?

PKJ

 
Kevin,

Really sorry to hear that this turned out to be a scam. I was hoping that it was going to be the real deal for you.

this kind of thing makes everyone in the hobby sick as well. Hope you are able to work with Ebay to get your money back.

Jim
Thanks Jim. I'll keep everyone posted on the progress with Ebay insurance. Looking good so far. Thank God I insisted the guy do the transaction through Ebay. If I had bought the car outside of Ebay or on Craigslist there would be zero chance of getting my money back.
I'm intrigued by the bogus Washington State document as the title evidence.   Surely rates up there with counterfeit passports & fake driver's licences.

I would have thought that Government departments would be interested in the fraudulent use of their logo, bar code & numbering structure etc.

And the ability to alter the images of those old door tag numbers.   Who do you trust ?

PKJ

Like I said Jim, these guys are good. I might not have a clue, but I think their system has lots of members feeding into an email system with the guy at the other end being able to produce any document or photo a perspective buyer needs to close the deal. I think it's as easy as contacting the guy who hacked someone's eBay account, asking a question, having a response like "I'll get back to you," the hacker emailing or calling his tech smart friend, getting the answer, and then emailing the perspective buyer back with the answer he wants to hear. I did confirm through eBay that the seller hacked someone elses' eBay accounts in these two separate scams. eBay indicated to me that they were in contact with the rightful eBay users and trying to "restore" their accounts.

 
Kevin,

Best of luck with all of this mess. What a shame it has come to this just trying to buy a car. Sure appreciate the updates so at least we can all learn from this.

 
You can also get the IP address of the computer that was used to send you emails and then get the region or country the computer is in. The email headers used to have a complete list of the routing and IP addresses, but most are hidden now.

However, there are still ways to get the information, including the origin of attachments, like photos.

There are online services that can help to trace them, some charge a nominal fee, others are free. Here is an example of one such service, which also provides a lot of information, you can find more by Googling "IP address lookup"

https://whatismyipaddress.com/ip-lookup

 
In all of the sent pics of documents, title, door tag etc.. did you ever see one of the actual vin tag on the dash? It would be interesting to see what that is unless a pic of that can also be photo shopped in some way.

sheesh.. these scammers must all be really computer savvy!

 
In all of the sent pics of documents, title, door tag etc.. did you ever see one of the actual vin tag on the dash? It would be interesting to see what that is unless a pic of that can also be photo shopped in some way.

sheesh.. these scammers must all be really computer savvy!
Yes. He sent a photo shopped picture of the real VIN plate photo that was listed in the Fastlane Classic Cars ad from a few years ago. I could not tell it was photo shopped but others like Kevin Marti saw it right away. All he did was change the last number of the VIN in the photo. The kicker for me was that he communicated with me by phone and all emails with the name "Arlem Jonas", he provided me a picture of a Washington state title with HIS name and address on it, and he had me wire the funds into a bank account with HIS name and address on it! I felt for sure he was the legitimate owner of the car. The funny thing is that the scam was only picked up when I forwarded the photos he had presented to me to the 7173mustang website, and then the photo shopping was picked up. If he had simply used the identical ad and photos from Fastlane with an unaltered VIN, he probably would have gotten away with it. I really don't get the whole idea of changing the VIN in the pictures. I notice these guys never put the VIN number of the car they are supposedly selling in the ad. I guess they are trying to prevent a perspective buyer from Googling the VIN number and finding other info about the car or seeing the ad they pirated. But I actually found the Fastlane ad BEFORE I wired him the money. He told me from the beginning that he had bought the car three years ago as an investment for $70,000. He had "family issues" and needed the money. He would sell it for $25K. I thought maybe there were some issues with the car and maybe it was never worth $70K to begin with. So maybe the car was only really worth $45K on the open market. And because he was in a jam, he might not have had the time to wait for the $45K price, so he was willing to do a "fire sale" and give it away at $25K. For a comparison of the real and altered photos, look at some of the earlier replies to this thread. You will see the one's I forwarded from the "sellers" emails and you can compare them to the ones in the "Fastllane" ad posted by Donkost. Here is a picture of the VIN plate he sent me.



popular girl names 1990

 
In all of the sent pics of documents, title, door tag etc.. did you ever see one of the actual vin tag on the dash? It would be interesting to see what that is unless a pic of that can also be photo shopped in some way.

sheesh.. these scammers must all be really computer savvy!
Yes. He sent a photo shopped picture of the real VIN plate photo that was listed in the Fastlane Classic Cars ad from a few years ago. I could not tell it was photo shopped but others like Kevin Marti saw it right away. All he did was change the last number of the VIN in the photo. The kicker for me was that he communicated with me by phone and all emails with the name "Arlem Jonas", he provided me a picture of a Washington state title with HIS name and address on it, and he had me wire the funds into a bank account with HIS name and address on it! I felt for sure he was the legitimate owner of the car. The funny thing is that the scam was only picked up when I forwarded the photos he had presented to me to the 7173mustang website, and then the photo shopping was picked up. If he had simply used the identical ad and photos from Fastlane with an unaltered VIN, he probably would have gotten away with it. I really don't get the whole idea of changing the VIN in the pictures. I notice these guys never put the VIN number of the car they are supposedly selling in the ad. I guess they are trying to prevent a perspective buyer from Googling the VIN number and finding other info about the car or seeing the ad they pirated. But I actually found the Fastlane ad BEFORE I wired him the money. He told me from the beginning that he had bought the car three years ago as an investment for $70,000. He had "family issues" and needed the money. He would sell it for $25K. I thought maybe there were some issues with the car and maybe it was never worth $70K to begin with. So maybe the car was only really worth $45K on the open market. And because he was in a jam, he might not have had the time to wait for the $45K price, so he was willing to do a "fire sale" and give it away at $25K. For a comparison of the real and altered photos, look at some of the earlier replies to this thread. You will see the one's I forwarded from the "sellers" emails and you can compare them to the ones in the "Fastllane" ad posted by Donkost. Here is a picture of the VIN plate he sent me.



popular girl names 1990
And here's another thing. Where the heck is input from the owner of the REAL car, VIN 1F05J173074?? You would think anyone owning a car like that would be connected to all the favorite sites for 71-73 Mustang owners.

 
This stuff is just very eye opening, for me anyway. I would have guessed a pic of the actual vin tag would be legit but when its magnified, you can see the outline of the 7 that was cut and pasted.

I know I'm going to be real leery of transactions in the future!

VIN_mod.jpg

 
The FBI thinks most of this is done from Africa and Russia and both are very good with computers. Might also be Chinese. I have heard that lots of the computers coming from China have a back door for China to access it when you have it. Is there any built in U.S.?

On the IP address. If you use a VPN does that not go away. When we did business in China I was using a VPN and it made me look like I was in California. I was sitting in my office one day listening to Pink Floyd off youtube and guy came by and wanted to know who it was. I told him Floyd and he had never heard of them. Using the VPN I could go to any web site I wanted. I made purchases off ebay and craigslist while in China.

If the FBI was unable to get any funds back from the $25,000,000 stolen last year there must be a way to hide for sure. Might do a search of my emails all 23,547 of them and see if I can find it. Takes too long to erase them so they just pile up.

Only deal face to face and go to a bank to close the deal. Always do an inspection of the car yourself, trust nobody else.

I think I told about the 1965 GT-350 that was brought to my friends shop to look at doing some work. It had been verified by the Shelby American group to be real and correct.

When Clay, my friend that restores cars, walked around the car he told the guy something did not look right about the top. He asked if he could pull the back seat out, was not and R model. With the seat out and rear panels you could see the car started life as a coupe and was made into a fastback.

When they looked under the inner fender well they had cut the VIN# out of a crashed Shelby and welded into the inner fender of the coupe and had never bothered to grind the welds on the bottom side.

The Shelby people just want your money they care nothing about helping you. BTW the engine in the car blew on his way home. No recourse Sold as is Where is. You should always include that in any BOS you do car, home anything.

 
The FBI thinks most of this is done from Africa and Russia and both are very good with computers. Might also be Chinese. I have heard that lots of the computers coming from China have a back door for China to access it when you have it. Is there any built in U.S.?

On the IP address. If you use a VPN does that not go away. When we did business in China I was using a VPN and it made me look like I was in California. I was sitting in my office one day listening to Pink Floyd off youtube and guy came by and wanted to know who it was. I told him Floyd and he had never heard of them. Using the VPN I could go to any web site I wanted. I made purchases off ebay and craigslist while in China.

If the FBI was unable to get any funds back from the $25,000,000 stolen last year there must be a way to hide for sure. Might do a search of my emails all 23,547 of them and see if I can find it. Takes too long to erase them so they just pile up.

Only deal face to face and go to a bank to close the deal. Always do an inspection of the car yourself, trust nobody else.

I think I told about the 1965 GT-350 that was brought to my friends shop to look at doing some work. It had been verified by the Shelby American group to be real and correct.

When Clay, my friend that restores cars, walked around the car he told the guy something did not look right about the top. He asked if he could pull the back seat out, was not and R model. With the seat out and rear panels you could see the car started life as a coupe and was made into a fastback.

When they looked under the inner fender well they had cut the VIN# out of a crashed Shelby and welded into the inner fender of the coupe and had never bothered to grind the welds on the bottom side.

The Shelby people just want your money they care nothing about helping you. BTW the engine in the car blew on his way home. No recourse Sold as is Where is. You should always include that in any BOS you do car, home anything.
Good info David.

 
David,

Your question about VPN is a good one. I don't have the complete answer, not being an IT person. I know that when I was working out of a satellite office and we had a T4 connection back to the corporate office everything looked like it came out of the corporate office. Except, when I took my laptop home and connected through my home network. At that time it was a VPN connection through a normal internet connection, but the IP address of my laptop, when at home, showed that it was a subset of my home network IP address.

I now just work part time from home, and my only connection is a VPN connection through my home network and the only IP address that my computer shows is my home network IP address.

So, I did a cursory check, just using the email header, of an email I sent myself from my work computer, and it does appear the only IP address shown is from corporate. So, I also use my personal cell phone for work emails, and the originating IP address is the same as from my work computer, which indicates to me that is the VPN IP address I was assigned. I don't know if one of the IP address tracking services can get through to show the actual computer IP address, or not.

 
Hi All. I wanted to let everyone know I got all my $25,000 back on the Ebay car I was scammed on. Ebay and their insurance really came through for me. It took about 2 months and I was nervous at several points in the process. Thank God I made sure with the "seller" that we did the transaction through Ebay. The investigator told me a number of people fell for the same scam. Be careful out there!

Kevin.

 
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