At the beginning of this year, we added approximately 100 new adverts per day to our classifieds section. Today we process over 600 adverts every day- a great growth in anyone’s book, and this has helped us become the first choice for those looking to buy a performance or prestige car.
Stolen picture? Owner recently moved abroad? Hmmmm
Most of these adverts require manual approval and approving these ads is not an easy job with a team of four, but an important one that cannot be overlooked.
More recently PistonHeads has been attacked heavily by scam advertisers. These guys advertise cars too cheaply in a hope to attract your attention. A few months ago, these adverts were easy to spot as they concentrated on Ferraris, Porsches and other high-end supercars usually advertised for £20-30,000. These days they concentrate on more everyday cars, and have made their prices less obvious. Of course they are still cheap, but less easy to spot in some cases.
PistonHeads advice is simple. If it sounds too good to be true it usually is - so walk away.
If you make contact with an advertiser and receive a reply explaining that the car is now overseas and a swift sale is needed - hence the low price - be aware that this is probably the most common scam currently operating. You will be asked to transfer funds to a shipping company who will deal with the transaction for you and will only release funds to the seller when you have seen the car and are happy with it. Now, you can probably guess what happens next? You don't see the car, nor do you see your money again and the shipping company's website goes offline.
Cars advertised by listing the specification are another giveaway - for example you or I would probably say: 2007/ 07, metallic red with climate control. Scam adverts will list Year of Registration: 2007, Body Colour: Red, Accessories fitted: Climate control and will list the cars specification in a similar fashion. Why do they do this? Well most cars advertised by scammers do exist - just not in their hands. The car photos will have been stolen from another advert and the criminals will use the DVLA database or similar vehicle check to obtain the cars details. They will then copy this data into their advert.
Another sign to look for is less than perfect English or unusual phrases such as 'the car is in full working condition' and scam adverts usually don't have a phone number.
So, what are we doing about this problem?
Well, we have appointed a new staff member who has already implemented new programs to stop scam adverts appearing in the first place. We have also set up a new process for blacklisting and banning those that place scam adverts. Today we found that scam gangs are now using an automated system to place these adverts rather than keying them in individually - this means we had over 70 adverts submitted this morning in a matter of minutes - although all were detected before going live.
Currently we ban the email address used by the scammers, we are also aware of the passwords that they use and can ensure these adverts automatically go into the queue for manual approval. However as soon as we ban an email address another is set up, and a ban on the IP address isn't possible as this affects too many legitimate advertisers. The manual approval method is the most effective, though most time consuming option - and some of you who have recently submitted a classified advert may experience a longer wait than normal before your advert goes live because of this.
What else are we doing? We are days away from agreeing two new options open to advertisers. Firstly, as mentioned before, scammers do not advertise a phone number; however it is not uncommon for a private advertiser to prefer using e mail to avoid sales calls or unwanted contact. We will launch a call filtering service where an operator ensures the call is genuine before putting it through, and they will give you a unique number to advertise meaning your personal details are safe. This will ensure you only speak to genuinley interested parties but more importantly you can show your advert is more trustworthy by displaying a phone number. We are in the process of negotiating the finer points of the contract and will launch this soon - the seller has the option of using this service when placing their advert.
Secondly, we will offer the seller a pre-sale security check, and we will display on the advert that the car is genuine. The seller will have their car checked against a national register to ensure car details and home addresses match up. When you see the PH symbol you know that the car exists in the hands of the seller. I won't give exact details of how this system works, but we hope to have this active within the next few weeks
In addition to this, we will ask all sellers for a home address, meaning we have more details should the Police need to investigate a scam advert, and it makes things difficult for overseas gangs or automated systems.
We will improve the process for site readers to report any scam advertisers that slip through the net meaning faster deletion, and we will continue to look at new ways to combat the problem.
Many of you have emailed to ask why we don’t simply charge for classified adverts as this will stop scam advertisers. PistonHeads has never charged for private adverts and it's not something that we plan to do; we'd rather find another way as free advertising is a great service that we don't want to lose. In addition to this, we have spoken to other sites who do charge and they still have a problem with scammers.
We apologise if fake adverts ruin your PistonHeads experience, we are working hard to stop the problem and will keep you updated with any other developments. We assure you that the vast majority of adverts currently shown are genuine, but please be aware of the potential scam adverts that avoid detection.
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