I try to live an honest life. I’m the kind of person who lays awake at night at the thought that I might have made someone unhappy. I felt so bad that my diesel Volkswagen broke down on a buyer that I refunded him $500. But even I have my limits, and one of them is when you buy a car from me and then try to scam someone else with it. Twice this year I sold my cars to people who seemed enthusiastic, but they were just dishonest people trying to dump my horribly broken cars onto innocent unsuspecting people.
What you’re about to read are just a couple of examples of why Facebook Marketplace, or, just people, can suck so much. When Marketplace launched in 2016, it seemed to be a great idea. You could sell things without eBay’s fees and as a buyer, you were buying things from people with real Facebook profiles and real lives. They weren’t the shadowy people hiding behind emails like Craigslist. Facebook then became the go-to classifieds site in many markets, but even Facebook isn’t stopping bad actors.
Let’s start with the freshest experiences I’ve had.
Back in March, I took my 2005 Volkswagen Touareg VR6 on one final ride. I bought the SUV in May 2021 with the intention of using it to haul my Kei car imports home from Washington and Maryland, respectively. The SUV then sort of became my rock and my go-to vehicle for hauling and off-roading. It was great at the job, but the vehicle always had issues that would have cost more than the SUV’s worth to fix.
For example, the Touareg’s transmission valve body was shot, and that part alone would have cost about half of the SUV’s value just to buy. Then there were the gaping rust holes, the failing headliner, the failing suspension, and a bunch of other small things. It was like the SUV was dying by a thousand cuts. The tipping point for me was learning that the Touareg had a power steering leak from somewhere that wasn’t a line. If I just fixed the mechanical issues and did nothing with the cosmetics I would have spent enough money to buy a nice Touareg V8, so the VR6 stopped making sense to me.
I try to be outrageously detailed in every listing I make. Facebook Marketplace has a character limit, but I try to make sure the buyer has a good idea of what they’re getting into. Here was the ad for the Touareg mentioned as issues:
When the buyer contacted me, I told them there was a chance the steering rack would need to be replaced. I also told them about a gas leak that I couldn’t put in the listing because of the character limit. They said those issues weren’t going to be a problem. Great!
Red flags appeared the moment the buyer arrived. I told him that the valve body was worn and as a result, it sometimes slammed into third gear. You had to be easy on the throttle during shifts into third gear. I went as far as to say he should lift his foot off of the gas pedal just on that shift. If he didn’t, he ran the risk of redlining the engine and possibly damaging the transmission as the worn valve body just couldn’t handle shifting into third when you’re rushing the SUV.
He didn’t listen. He got in and floored it right there in my neighborhood, hitting at least 45 mph in a place where a kid could have popped out at any moment. That was screwed up enough, but I heard the engine bounce off of the rev limiter and a loud clunk as the SUV flared its shift into third. When he got back, I told him he better be giving me the money because he was ruining my transmission. Sure enough, he gave me my money, then drove out of the neighborhood, flooring it. I heard one last redline and monster transmission clunk as the taillights disappeared. I never met someone who literally floored it everywhere, but that guy did it.
Somehow, he managed to make it back to Milwaukee without grenading the transmission, and less than a day later he posted this listing:
Now, I have eyes, so I can tell he did nothing to my Touareg. He didn’t even remove the last stickers I was struggling to get off. The listing was also posted so close to the sale that it was almost impossible that he could have purchased a new valve body and installed it. There just wasn’t enough time to do really any of the necessary repairs. It was obvious it was a zero-effort flip and any problem was dismissed “O2 Sensor” problem. The reality is, my Touareg was not in daily driver condition.
Thankfully, it seemed he couldn’t find someone to take the bait as the SUV was up for sale for six months before the listing was taken down. Hopefully, it didn’t end up in the hands of someone who thought they were getting a good car.
Now we get to my Phaeton.
My second round of cheap Volkswagen Phaeton ownership was fun but also challenging. I bought this 253,000-mile Phaeton from a reader hoping to turn it into a cheap beater with a heater. Well, the car’s valve cover gaskets failed on the way home. On a later drive, the leak got so bad the car almost caught fire. Then, in true Phaeton fashion, it had to break in other ways.
The blower motor went, the passenger seat motor stopped working, and then the pump for the air suspension started getting weak. I fixed the seat and the air suspension pump, but then at some point in the recent past, some jackwagon did a hit-and-run on the Phaeton. None of my neighbors or my cameras caught it. The cop in my building also didn’t see or hear any reports.
The pieces you see below are sort of just placed there, the bumper was actually worse than it looks:
I was once again set backward. My Phaeton was painted in a rare blue color. We’re not talking about VW’s fantastic Waterworld here, but rare enough that I hadn’t found a single bumper in the correct color. My eyes also spotted additional damage under the bumper.
I’ve been on a bit of a selling spree this year. I sold the U-Haul camper, my wife’s BMW E39, my VW Passat TDI, my VW Jetta SportWagen TDI, and technically the Buell Blast. None other than Stephen Walter Gossin taught me that it’s just not worth keeping a bunch of beaters around unless they’re making me happy. Truth be told, I do need to cut my fleet down so I’m not as stressed as I am, so I added it to the sales pile. Here’s what that listing looked like:
I figured $1,000 was fair given the issues and the difficulty of finding a bumper. Even the bumpers I found that were the wrong color were $200 to $600 before shipping, so this could be a pricey repair, and that’s assuming you don’t replace the totally mangled parking sensors or anything else.
The messages came in at such a rapid pace that I couldn’t even respond to them fast enough. Once again, I probably priced this car too cheap. I paid $2,000 for it, so maybe I should have priced it at $1,500 or something. Oh well.
Here’s one of my least favorite parts about selling vehicles. In the past, I used to hold a vehicle for a supposedly interested buyer, but then they often had a habit of not showing up, making me lose out on a sale I could have had prior. So, now I just sell to the first person who shows up with cash.
Some people ask to come even when someone else is already on their way. I used to do that, but someone once threatened to kill me over something like that, so I don’t do that anymore, either. It’s one person at a time, take it or leave it.
I got tons of attention from the ad and honestly, I did turn down some people. One guy told me he was a fresh immigrant and needed a cheap reliable car to get around and for his contracting work. As much as I would have loved to see ladders and such on a Phaeton, I couldn’t do it. I told him bluntly: “This is the worst possible work vehicle money can buy. It gets terrible gas mileage, and requires premium fuel, and it’s not if it’ll break on you, but when. I’d recommend getting a beater Toyota or something.”
Again, I could have made an easy $1,000 off of the guy, but I don’t roll like that.
The first guy to show up was, as the kids say, pretty “sus.” First, he offered me $500 for the random old Hyundai Elantra parked next to my Phaeton. I didn’t even know who owned that car. Then he got into an argument with his girlfriend (I assume it was his girlfriend). They were arguing in Spanish, which I’m not fluent in. But, as I understood it, he was certain the car had four cylinders while she said it had eight. She then even took him to the back of the car and spelled out “P.H.A.E.T.O.N.” But she didn’t know what the car was either because she had to Google it.
All of it was bizarre, but look, I just wanted my money. First, he tried to offer me $500, citing the cracked windshield. I pointed out that the cracked windshield was in the ad, so I’m not sure why he was trying to use that for negotiation. He then offered me $600, stating that the car didn’t have brakes. I pointed out that the car stops and I watched him stop, so that’s not going to fly, either.
Then, he switched to Spanish, offering me $800. I said “Look, it’s a $1,000 car that runs and drives, it’s going to have lots of problems. If you have a problem with that, I have five other people who want to come right now.” Then we exchanged a bunch of “lo sientos” for a few minutes. He then offered me $900 before I told him I was firm at “mil” ($1,000) and not a dollar less.
That $1,000 materialized weirdly quickly. I passed him the title and he drove away. I hoped he was maybe going to fix it up or whatever, but it was just a few hours later when he published this listing:
The listing is still up, but I’m not going to link to it. Just know if you see this Phaeton, it’s being misrepresented. Note how the photos don’t show the rust or the big dent, but then he says there’s no rust, which just isn’t true. The pictures also conveniently fail to show the hit-and-run damage. Clever.
That’s twice in one year I’ve accidentally sold cars to flippers who are better described as scammers. Both of these cars had laundry lists of problems, but suddenly, after just a few hours after being sold, those issues were gone! Weird how that works.
This is just one huge reason you can’t really trust anyone on Facebook Marketplace. Or, I suppose if I’m really honest here, it’s why you have to be careful buying a vehicle from anyone anywhere. You have no idea who is just intentionally misrepresenting a car to get your money. Thankfully, both the Touareg and the Phaeton were so broken that you don’t need to be a car person to figure out something is wrong. I mean, the Phaeton begins visibly smoking within a couple of minutes of being started. But that still might be enough to catch someone who might not do a test drive, so someone can still get scammed by this.
Sadly, I wish this was it with the denizens Facebook Marketplace. I have purchased about 60 cars in my life thus far and over 30 motorcycles. Most of them came from Marketplace.
I’ve seen and experienced it all. Guys have actually threatened to kill me because I didn’t sell them a motorcycle for their low-ball offer. Other people fail to show up, harass you, never respond to messages, or are just straight-up bigots. We won’t even talk about how annoying it is to get a “Hi, is this available?” and respond to it just to get nothing back or an offer that’s 10 percent of your asking price. Then there were the guys who jumped my Honda Gold Wing’s title about four times, racking up a bunch of tickets in my name along the way.
Recently, I tried to buy a Ford E-350 Power Stroke from a contractor and when I arrived his first words were “where are the men?” Come on, man. I’m learning another lesson here. If I don’t want my cars being misrepresented by shady flippers, I should probably be a bit more selective with my buyers. I should have known something was up when the fella got into an argument about cylinder counts.
So, selling cars private party online continues to suck, which probably doesn’t surprise any of you. Still, I feel like this stuff needs to be pointed out. So, if you’re in the Chicago or Milwaukee area and see either of these vehicles for sale, report the ads and then run, not walk, far away.
(Images: Author)
Once upon a time I was selling a beat up ’05 2500HD on FB. It had trans problems, probably a couple injectors trying to go bad, rusting out in the rocker panels, but it got me to work. It was listed a long time because I was a bit on the high side with the price. The one serious buyer I had was a kid (“young man” is probably more accurate, but they’re all kids to me) who wanted it bad, probably to get into the Duramax club his older brother and bros were in from the way he talked. He was trying to get me to sell with a partial payment and get the rest later but I didn’t need the sale that bad and was sticking to my guns.
The kid had a stable job and serious girlfriend. He seemed a bit dumb in the way most of us are as kids but basically a good egg with family and responsibilities that he seemed to be taking care of as best he could. He eventually told me he was going to sell his truck to get the cash to buy mine. I asked if the truck he was selling was his daily driver that got him to work and he said it was. I asked if he had another vehicle to use and he said he didn’t. I told him he couldn’t sell his daily driver to buy my piece of junk, it was not to be trusted, and he had responsibilities. He insisted he had to. I told him if he sold his daily driver I would refuse to sell my truck to him and then he wouldn’t have anything. Find another way. He grumbled, but he eventually worked something out with his boss to get a cash advance, which I thought was a horrible idea. That was going to be one of the mistakes that teaches you about life, but it wasn’t going to be catastrophic, so I kept my opinions to myself on that score.
I got the sale, but I was ready to walk away from the best lead I’d had in months to keep this kid from screwing himself.
I prefer Craigslist over Facebook – even the experience of browsing Marketplace kinda sucks. It straight up won’t work on a browser, have to use the app on my phone. Then there are the ad listings inserted right into the results, and for some reason the filters never work right. Filtering by distance has pretty much never worked.
I prefer CL, too, but unfortunately my local market has migrated away from it to FB. Not much to be found at CL anymore except car lots posting inventory.
Zucc wanting to keep his engagement/user count numbers up has meant that FB does almost nothing to take down spammers and scammers. For average consumer goods like electronics, IME the scam rate is approaching 25-30 percent of all listings, and people are harder to deal with as a result. Like, I was trying to buy a TV recently and every other post was asking for a deposit (a good sign of a scam).
At some point we’ll just end up squeezing everyone back to IRL yard sales or classifieds. I much preferred Craigslist because the lift a finger threshold was higher – you usually had to commit to sending an e-mail at the minimum if not talking on the phone.
Yeah, what a bunch of dipshits…hopefully it gets better next time
Remember those “mean people suck” stickers? I bought one once just so I could cut off the “mean” part. I had it on Volvo 240 for a while until I ended giving that car to a relative who peeled it off when her neighbor complained about it. The sticker definitely got some negative comments, but I still stand by that assertion. This article is a great example.
I kind of want to go see the Phaeton and offer him $500 because the windshield is cracked.
I’m with you in spirit, but be careful. He might just be ready to cut his losses.
Wait, are you telling me that information on Facebook is unreliable? Wait until I tell this to my conservative uncle.
When selling my Honda Fit, I listed it on Craigslist, Kijijii, Autotrader.ca and Facebook marketplace.
By far, I got the most hits from Facebook.
ALSO, all the terrible bullshitting scamming asshole idiot people that used to be on Craigslist ALL seem to have moved to Facebook Marketplace now.
And conversely, Craigslist seems to be dead, Kijijii is almost dead, Autotrader is limping along and then there is FB.
There were at least a few assholes that would give me lowball offers that I was 99% sure were bullshitting dishonest scamming asshole flippers. For those, I woudn’t budge on my price at all… and actually went UP in price when I found them to be especially annoying.
I ended up selling my fit to someone who genuinely needed a cheap car and who was willing/able to do the work needed to get it back on the road
I think the popularity of FB is due to FB refusing to do anything meaningful about scammers or scam accounts. And reporting fake accounts and fake pages does nothing. I know because I’ve tried.
And not just relating to marketplace, but also the many scam pages and accounts that are used to spam/scam people with payroll and other scams… that facebook indirectly profits off of.
I predict that at some point in the future, FB will face a massive class action lawsuit relating to its refusal to do anything real about scammers and scam accounts.
Craigslist started charging a nominal fee to list a car so all the cheap fuck scammers moved to FB.
FB is so annoying with all the scammers. I got so many of the check scams I started stringing them along and then giving them the address for our local state police barracks to mail it to.
I also got a ton of the “well my sister is going to come pick it up” BS
I haven’t figured out the scam, but “women” posting hot pics will drop into the middle of a comments session asking random men to add them as FB friends. That is NOT normal behavior. Yet FB does nothing about them
It probably has to do with harvesting account information for spamming/scamming purposes of some sort. And FB does nothing because the scammers help drive site traffic and inflate the “user” numbers. Hence, they profit off doing nothing about the scammers.
The only way it will change is if FB gets hit with massive fines from multiple governments and/or gets hit with massive class action lawsuits by people who have been scammed in some way.
Usually, I drive my cars into the ground and then donate them to a nonprofit I support. This works great! I’m always surprised, by how much they end up getting for them and I’m able to support something I believe in.
About a year ago, I had a very specific situation that resulted in me selling a car on craigslist. We were planning a move from Colorado to the east coast. We had two cars at the time and one of them was a 19 year old Camry that my wife bought new. At this point the Camry had become our park at the airport car that we drove to the grocery store once a week. It also had just shy of 200k miles, no rust, no problems other than a trashed back seat (kid). That 2005 Camry probably had another 100k worth of miles left in it but logistically it just didn’t make sense for us to transport it. I decided to sell it to someone that needed reliable, basic transportation. I looked at various sites and priced it around $500 less then any Camry vaguely comparable. Most of the other Camry’s had many more issues than our car (e.g. 300k miles, visible body damage, known mechanical problems).
All that said, it still took me two weeks to find an actual buyer. Lots of offers for $500 or even $300. Lots of no shows. One father/son came to test drive it and clearly the teenager was less than enthused about the prospect of a 20 year old Camry as a first car. The buyer was the second test drive and exactly the kind of person I was hoping to find as a buyer. Kid was maybe, 23. Had just finished college at the local university and was working for county government as a park ranger when the car he drove thru high school and college finally died. He was super excited about the car and offered me $150 less then asking. I sold it to him, saw him driving around town a couple of times and even bumped into him at one of the local parks. He came up and told me the car was still running great and thanked me for selling it to him. It was hassle to find a genuine buyer and yet a very satisfying experience in the end.
Mercedes: We had a similar experience as a buyer. My son has a 2007 NC Miata that he hit a deer with. So we found the same color Miata with a blown engine. Photos looked OK. After lengthy back and forth with the seller, we rented a Uhaul trailer and drove 6 hours from Maine to NY. We arrived at night to a trailer park (first red flag), then the seller informed us he hadn’t moved it to a spot we could pull it onto the trailer, and had no key or battery. (second and third red flags) That meant we couldn’t even get it going enough to turn the wheels, or open the trunk. Upon inspection with flashlights, the car was in FAR worse condition than the photos. Seller apparently posted and shared photos of the vehicle when newer. It had front end damage, rear end damage and side damage on both sides, water leaking and molding inside and everything was broken, rotten or generally gross. The plastic bumper cover had been JB welded to the metal fender? Owner said his “body guy” did a good job. We drove home with an empty trailer another 6 hours and were only out gas and rental fees. Next time I’m going to insist on a video walkaround.
Had a similar instance trying to shop for my son. This was a dealer, and the pictures they posted of the car must’ve been at least 5 or 6 years old, because the car had lots of visible rust and peeling paint not present in the pictures. Who knows, maybe they just used photos from another vehicle lol.
That aside, the car did run and drive very well, and there was some interest still since the rust is something we could’ve fixed without a lot of trouble. When it came to negotiating time, they were pretty annoyed that I wouldn’t want to pay asking (they were willing to drop a hundred bucks off) and they were even more annoyed when we just walked out.
Good for you. The Dude abides. Don’t give these people any money. I just keep telling my son that there are others out there every day. Especially now with the internet. We drove 6 hours each way for his car when we bought it because it was an honest seller, selling an honest car at a reasonable price. He just did his first full track day in it yesterday. Success.
In today’s world, it seems it’s OK to lie… I agree with you and have stopped using Facebook Market. The scammers destroyed Craigslist, and moved…
Marketplace sucks as a buyer too.
The Search flat out doesn’t work. Say you wanted a Miata between 96 and 04 like I did. Searching for that with the site tools showed a few but then searching for “convertible” showed more that met my criteria.
AFAICT the sellers had filled in the form with the year and such. Search just sucked.
And that’s you, who get those filters at all! Mainland Europe doesn’t get any beside exterior and interior color – and they are not different lists, so you can look for a car with a pink or turquoise interior if you want. (Although you’ll just get a slew of cars with normal interiors, because relevant ads don’t exist, but that’s rarely ever stopped Marketplace from serving you a result feed.) And specifying what you want through the search field will reset your pick of a category so you’ll lose those filters anyway. And will still not filter out irrelevant results, because again, if they’re not showing you irrelevant ads they’re showing you less ads, and that won’t do.
It is genuinely infuriating to see Facebook, a company that spent billions of dollars, eroding our rights and the agency of our institutions in the process, just to figure out what we’re interested in, being so completely, flippantly, almost mockingly uninterested in letting me tell it what I want to see.
The jackwagons who fill the bottom of their listings w/ every keyword in the trade, whether it applies to the list car or not. Thus, the filters don’t work. Nvrmnd the jerks who list an automatic as a manual, because it has flappy paddles, or just, because. Saw a ton of those when I was looking for an NC PRHT w/ xenon lights. Seemed like every one of those were ordered w/ automatics.
Oh no, it isn’t that, I’ve checked and I’ve never seen it be a matter of keyword spam in the description. But yeah, that is annoying – and may be a reason they elected to not bother making the search, like, work.
I guess it was good that I didn’t look at market place after I sold the 3 vehicles this summer. One was definitely a project vehicle and I highly doubt the buyer tried to flip it at the price he paid and he seemed genuinely interesting in the condition of the cab since the other one he had was a bit rusted. On the other two the one kid might have been a potential flipper, but he paid my price. The other I was a bit skeptical since there wasn’t much of a profile, then I was a bit worried that when I was just about to the meeting place I got a message that they were going to have to stop at a different cash machine. But when they showed up the name on the license matched the profile and the young girl was the one that did the test drive and while her boyfriend was mostly silent. The big problem with the car was the paint was peeling and it had some surface rust because of it. He did say that his father was a painter and they were going to paint it. So I can’t complain if they do paint it and then sell it for more than I sold it for.
Either way I got basically what I was asking for them and I didn’t under price them. I did list all the faults and did a lot of pictures showing them clearly. In all cases they were gone the same day to the first person that showed up. I also purchased a car found on there a state away and I can’t complain about that transaction. So I’m 4 for 4 on the positive side.
I have a related story I’ve shared before but it seems worth repeating here:
I had a Triumph TR-3 that had been in a garage fire. It was a wreck, the windshield was shattered, all the chrome darkened, the paint bubbling and peeling, (with plenty of old bondo beneath and some rust under that), blown tires, singed leather seats, melted top, burned carpet, etc. Mechanically it had run when parked but then the fire happened so it no longer had a chance in Hell of even turning over. I’m not sure much was salvageable on the car. The only reason I had bought it back from the insurance company was sentimental value which had since evaporated.
Anyway it was sitting in it new home in my garage for years taking up space I’d rather have used for my other cars. I really was not looking forward to rebuilding it yet again. I’d already done so a few times.
Anyhow, a few passers by that had seen it’s sadness in the open garage had knocked on my door looking to buy. Each time I had said no, until one day I was in the garage and a very excited dude pulled up in a new Dodge Charger (more on that later) and said it would be PERFECT as a father/son project, then asked how much I wanted for it.
It’s condition was obvious to anyone with eyes. Even so I gave him the buy back price I had paid the insurance company a few years before. He balked and tried to knock off a few thousand. I said no, I wasn’t looking to sell.
I’d have thought that would be the end of it but he kept going, pulling at the heartstrings. It was annoying, I wasn’t looking to sell and something about this guy was fishy. Guys in brand new Chargers don’t tend to mix with guys into ancient British sports cars.
He asked if he could get his wife and son over to look at it. Sure I said. A little while later his wife showed up with the kid. She was PISSED! The daggers from her eyes were lethal! The son was on some kind of Gameboy and couldn’t be bothered to even look up much less look at the car. He clearly had no interest in any kind of automotive father/son project.
Something was definitely wrong here.
The guy continued to pull at my heartstrings, the wife shot some more daggers then took off in a huff with the disinterested boy. By this time Mr Charger had come up closer to my ask but still I wouldn’t budge.
Now he pleaded poverty, he’d have to finance the car and he wasn’t sure his financier would approve my ask. So you can afford a WAY more expensive brand new Charger but you need to finance a shitty project car? He asked to invite his financier to inspect the car for himself. OK, now the mystery deepens – I don’t know many financiers who are going to come out to look at a POS like I had. Sure I said, lets see where this goes.
A little while (and much more bullshit) later a well dressed gentleman pulled up in a late model Range Rover.
Aha I thought, this is the REAL buyer!
The gentleman looked the car over and didn’t seem too happy with Mr Charger but offered a price just shy of my ask. Fuck it I thought, I want my garage back.
A few hours later after the tow truck pulled away I looked up the name of “Mr. Moneybags” on the check. Turns out he owned an import/export business specializing in repatriating old British sport cars. As I had suspected “Mr Charger” was a finder. Every damn word out of his mouth had been lies to try to get me to drop my price. Fortunately I stuck to my guns.
I looked up the price of TR3s. I found a few that were in ratty but salvagable condition better than mine for a bit less than my ask. I felt I had gotten the better part of that deal
A couple of months ago out of curiosity I looked up what TR-3s are going for now. I found two on my local CL in much better (e.g. not roasted) condition than mine had been. The ask on one was a bit less, the other a bit more. So even now I still think I got the better end of the deal.
TL:DR: Sometimes you CAN turn the tables.
“import/export business”
Oh yeah, like George Costanza?
Enough to overpay for a burnt out husk.