I witnessed a situation where an auto broker from out of town, visited Florida and he was in the business of “take over payment” cars, where he talks people who post ads on craigslist their “take over payments” car, where they don’t want their vehicle repo’d, and want to try to get the car out of their name so their credit isn’t ruined for what ever reason. The broker would look up ads on craigslist and talk them into giving the car to him to sell, a 90-day contract, where it is a one page document that says he will sell it in 90 days making sure it has insurance, and within the 90 days he will make the payments. He in turn takes the car, straight to a “buyer”, I am assuming it is a straw buyer, who turns around and sells it to a 3rd party, a buyer who has good credit, i.e. a dealer … mainly. I tried to see if I could start a small, very small dealership quazi middle man type of business where I could do the same thing, but didn’t end up doing anything with it, only after the broker was possibly doing something wrong, either selling the cars to the wrong guy for a commission, or the person he was selling the cars to were doing something wrong with the cars. What ended up happening to a few of the cars is, some of them did not get transferred properly, were in limbo without any insurance or car payments made and the finance companies started looking to the registered owners for the cars or payments on those cars.
As a car dealer, are any of you familiar with dealing in “take over payment” cars, where people post on craigslist; and if so, do dealers go to craigslist to help build up their inventory on their lots, or is this even legal. I talked to police a couple of times about it, and they said, it is more of a civil consumer matter than of a criminal nature, because the registered owner gives the keys to the broker, taking a chance that anything could happen to the car. I did a lot of research too, and the company I started, was called auto consignment, because anytime a person were to give their vehicle or anything of value to a consignment “shop”, the owner assumes all losses incurred if something were to happen to the item of value. I need more insight into this; as I am very new this type of thing. I didn’t realize the car business was this complex, because of all the contracts between lenders and buyers etc; and what contractual obligations the buyers have to the lenders because I would think that they are breaching the lending contract, by buying into someone’s flimsy 90 day contract that could potentially become breached. Do you think it is the entire fault of the 90 day agreement broker, i.e. because is agreeing to sell or refinance. Then I read about a widespread problem of “straw buyers” I don’t know if has the same meaning, that buys brand new cars cheap, and for all I know they are stolen cars, wherein they turn around and re-register them in other states and get new titles, altering title information; and even going to the extent of switching out vin numbers. I thought there were vin numbers in more than one place on a car.
Suffice to say, I thought I was interested in getting into the “car business” on a very small scale, but now, as I delve into it, I do not want anything to do with it. There needs to be a universal database for VIN numbers or a new way to identify vehicles. Maybe the VIN number is an archaic way to identify cars now a days; maybe there should be a way to scan a car to see all of it’s history; where there is no way the information can be altered without rendering it unusable; or a system that sends out an alert if it is tampered with.