Three Tips to Avoid Car Shipping Scams
Scams are happening daily everywhere including in the auto shipping industry. If you are not vigilant, you can lose a valuable asset, in this case your vehicle, by paying for a shipping service that does not get fulfilled or never getting your car delivered. Thus, it is important that you learn how to identify car shipping scams and avoid them so you are not a victim.
Luckily in most cases, it is not too hard to differentiate a reputable company from a scammer. It requires awareness in knowing what to look for, understanding their common tactics and having the ability to detect and deter them at all times. Below are a few tips to follow to help avoid getting scammed when searching for an auto shipping company.
Be a friend of the Better Business Bureau
The first place to head to if you want to avoid car shipping scams is the Better Business Bureau (BBB). Only genuine and reputable businesses manage to get listed here; a scammer will never manage to get space on the BBB. The Better Business Bureau has always been a helpful resource to check the legitimacy of businesses as it keeps records of complaints, contact information, the duration the company has been in business, and the period they have been members of the BBB.
The car shipping industry in Canada has a lot of turnover. With many startups never surviving beyond the first year, this has somehow given room for fraudsters to scam people with one time deals before disappearing. By checking the company’s information in the BBB, you will be in a position to tell if it is a fake or a genuine company and whether you should trust it.
Check the company’s website for common scam pointers
Scammers never have time or the resources to invest in creating a professional websites. They will hurriedly patch up a website which will most likely be full of glaring mistakes such as typos and misinformation amongst others. Other than the glaring mistakes in the design and the content, scam auto shipping websites will not have any contact information and if they do, it will be a phony phone number or a non-functional email address. These should be your indicators that you are about to engage a scam company to ship your vehicle.
Check their reviews online
The final way to know if an auto shipping company is set up to scam you is to check reviews online. Most of the scammers will not have any reviews and if they do, they will be full of complaints and negative comments. If you find that the Canadian car shipping company you were considering doesn’t have any reviews or it has very poor reviews, leave that site as soon as possible and don’t engage them in any way.
