scammed need help

Your conclusion is entirely based on the second CarFax report, which you have designated "real." If both the reports have the same VIN, then you were either cheated/fraud or there's some mistake and CarFax received faulty information. The reports you posted don't show the VIN.

Are you saying that the condition of the car was consistent with 33K miles driven even though there were actually 300K miles on it? That's pretty amazing.

 

ya, i gotta think the 300k is a mistake. pretty sure you'd know it.

 

My impressions: (FWIW)

I'm thinking that you have the seller dead to rights on fraud.
However (comma!!!)

Looking backwards:
The problem with using a CarFax report is that unless you are the one who bought the report, they cannot be held responsible for any errors or misrepresentations that you encounter when buying a car. MANY people see a CarFax report in the wild and presume it's the genuine article.
You could have also checked for dealer records, had a mechanic look at the car.....yada-yada.

Of course....you already know all that.

I'm thinking that the California is going to be a tough market to get anything out of the DA for this, but it IS CLEARLY fraud!
The the scale of the misrepresentation leads me to believe that more than $1000 might be involved, which means that if you signed any papers when you bought the car you can probably hang a felony complaint on the seller.....IF you can find them and IF you can light a fire under some public servant who isn't chasing people off of the beach, letting other criminals out of jail because of the 'Rona, but forcing people in old folks homes to shelter in place.....and leasing hotel rooms for the "un-housed."

2014 California Proposition 47 - Wikipedia

Good Luck!
(you're gonna NEED it!)

 

Why not go to Toyota, have them run the vin number.
They can tell you any work that was done by Toyota.

 

It's usually good to be cautious when faced with conflicting data. Right now it sounds like you've got two Car Fax reports in conflict and don't know which is right vs. wrong. You're a professional mechanic, yet were fooled by a 39k vs. 300k mileage difference - that just seems not likely to me.

I agree. And you don't even have to go anywhere. When I got my Prius, I was able to log in, create an account, get "all" the records without going anywhere or proving ownership (which was a little scary, and I warned the friend I got the car from). Once you get that, completely independent of carfax, it will either look like a 39k car or a 300k car.

Is there anything at all other than carfax that makes you think it has 300k miles? Seems like it would be incredibly obvious.

Here's another easy and obvious thing to do: Look on the title, registration, and the license plate to see the month in 2015 that the car was first titled / registered. One CarFax says May, one says Oct/Nov. The plate, registration, and title should all match eachother, and will probably match only one of the CarFaxes. This will not be true if the car was ever titled outside CA, but as long as it remained here, the month never changes.

Here's a free and easy test (for anyone) on any car that has had a California smog check:

Vehicle Test History


It's a state (technically a democratic peoples republic) website that gives you the full smog check history when you input a VIN or license plate. It used to give pretty extensive results, but the DPRC must have stripped things down, so less info is available, and it may show nothing at all. But if it shows something, it might be a good tie breaker between the two carfax reports.

 

Is the VIN on that original seller-provided CarFax report the VIN that you see in the various places on the vehicle itself? And are you sure that that is the same VIN on the second CarFax report? (Do VINs include a check digit such that getting one character wrong renders the whole number invalid?) Even with only a free CarFax account, I can see the whole history of both our cars: the Prius and a Pontiac Vibe.

 

Yes, for Toyota Prius (and maybe all cars sold in the USA?) digit #9 in the VIN is a checksum.

I know one of my Porsches has a Z in digit 9 on the body, as the car is made in Germany, and when they make the body, they don't know whether it will be sold in the USA or elsewhere, so a Z goes there until production is completed. And I know that detail because it has caused me problems at smog check time. The VIN by the windshield does have the full final VIN, with that digit changed from a Z to a number, and the mismatch seems impossible to comprehend for some people.

 

Hire an attorney and hold him accountable for the fraud. Contact DMV and see if they have investigative unit that deals with odometer fraud, hold him accountable. I’m dealing with a problem with a contractor now, not fraud but workmanship has failed. I will pay legal fees that amount to how much the job costs just to make a point. I hate people that scam and try to take advantage of others. Some people go away and figure if it costs more in the end than it is not worth it. I will not go away....only you can decide how far you want to take it.

 

Prius has a four-cylinder engine. So that's not a "problem" that would suggest fraud.


I wasn't convinced there was fraud based solely on the second CarFax report indicating something different than the first. Since there is no disclosure of the VIN in the second report, it could be that the OP just gave CarFax the wrong VIN number and its for a different car; or it could be some problem at CarFax. As a poster above mentions, we don't know which is wrong. It would help if the OP could show the complete VIN in the reports -- in each pix, he has something covering up the last part of the VIN.

What DOES suggest fraud is the INTERNAL inconsistencies in the CarFax report provided by the seller. The seller provided CarFax report indicates mileage of 38,672 but the small print says: "This history report is based on information supplied to CarFax and available as of 1/4/17"

That doesn't jibe with the smog report which indicates mileage of 38,850 on 2/4/20.

It's possible that the car sat virtually motionless for three years, but that not likely. OTOH, I'm still troubled by the condition of the interior not immediately screaming, "I've been driven 300K miles, not 38K miles!" So maybe the transaction is legit and the 2nd CarFax is for a different car.

If the OP would post a pix showing the VIN in each CarFax report, that would solve the case.

 

I don't see a complete VIN in the seller-provided CarFax report: the part that is visible is consistent with a Prius, but we can't tell which Prius. With the complete VIN it would be possible, even without paying for a full CarFax report, to get a fair amount of detail about the car.

 

Based on the tag number, the seller provided smog test checks out as ACCURATE at least to the extent that a 2015 Toyota Prius was tested (and passed) on 2/4/20.

 

You just beat me to the punch for correcting my post. There are 11 digits disclosed and the VIN decoder got me to Prius (allegedly with 5 trim?) and I mistakenly thought that meant enough.

And I also agree that if the OP would show us both CarFax reports with the VIN not covered up, we could solve this case! As it is now, we're a hung jury.

 

You have privacy concerns with the VIN (which would verify the story)? And you leave the seller's license plate number visible? You don't think that any law enforcement agency that could run a VIN could just as easily run the license plate and look at the who bought the car?

Yeah, OK. This was interesting but clearly isn't going anywhere. I'm out.

 

I think the point might be that we random people on PriusChat are perhaps not the best suited people to be conducting investigations with the unredacted VIN, however much easier we feel that would make it for us to "verify the story" (as if our "verification" is anything the OP needs). Seems like the OP was willing to supply the unredacted VIN to DMV and SJPD. That seems more or less in line with the regular order of things.

 

I plugged that registration into CarFax, which gave me the complete VIN as JTDKN3DU0F1989218. It's described as a Prius Five in Good condition, with 300577 miles, and an estimated Private Party sale value (in ZIP 90011, picked at random) of $8,190. I cannot see any details, but it does tell me that there are "70 history records" for the vehicle; that's a lot of routine maintenance (plus whatever accidents) for a car originally described as having done only 39K miles.

Perhaps the seller-provided CarFax report was fake, or perhaps the car had been in Uber service between the date of that CarFax report and now.

IANAL, but it seems to me that if the seller claimed that the car still had only 39K miles at the time of the sale, s/he was committing fraud. If, OTOTH, the seller simply said that the car was "in good condition, and here's the CarFax report," and the buyer did not realize that the report was three years old, the seller might be in the clear (legally but not morally -- except that winding back the odometer is illegal, is it not? (If, indeed, it was the total miles display that was showing 39K miles rather than one of the trip displays.) How easy is it to tamper with the odometer reading in a Prius? I'm not looking for a how-to -- just whether or not it is easy.

 

In California, for cars less than 10 years old, like this one, the seller is required to certify the odometer reading, under penalty of perjury when they sign the title over to the buyer. Federal law has a similar requirement.

Here's the scan from that section when I got my Prius:



If they lied there, the seller is definitely not in the clear.

I still can't understand how anyone, let alone a pro mechanic, could mistake a 300k car for a 39k one. I mean, the seats, the buttons, the paint chips, ... maybe the seller missed his true calling as a detailer and mechanic.

 

I had noticed it previously, but I don't think anyone has commented on the fact that the seller-provided CarFax report even shows a different original dealer from the apparently authentic CarFax report: Toyota Stevens Creek, San Jose vs. Toyota Town of Stockton. So it seems not to be the case that the seller simply presented an outdated CarFax report for the same vehicle. It all seems very suspicious

 

300k...got to be getting pretty tired...... oil burning?