’Dirty oil scam’: Ontario man tricked into selling car for $1,000

New scam revealed involving criminals tampering with your vehicle to make you think it has serious problems.

For those looking to sell their vehicle, there is a new scam in which criminals tamper with it to make it appear to have serious mechanical problems.

Known as the “dirty oil” scam, it involves fraudsters spraying oil on your engine, up your tailpipe and possibly even adding dirty oil to the coolant reservoir.

As soon as the engine is turned on, a cloud of smoke appears, prompting the fraudsters to convince the owner that the engine has blown so they can make you a lowball offer.

That is what happened to Mark Roffey and Carol Crawford of Paris, Ont.

They listed their 2016 Hyundai Santa Fe for $7,000 on Facebook Marketplace. Later, two people came at night to see the vehicle, and one of them wanted to inspect the trunk.

“He was looking under the mats and at the spare tire and had me completely occupied, so I wasn’t aware what the other person was doing. I didn’t notice that he had gone around to the front of the car and opened the hood,” Roffey recounted to CTV News Toronto.

He later reviewed the security video, which, according to Roffey, appeared to show the man who opened the hood spraying oil throughout the engine compartment.

The potential buyer then asked to go for a test drive, but after pulling out of the driveway, he reversed and backed in.

“The other gentleman who was hanging around the driveway then crouched down and placed something liquid in the tailpipe,” said Roffey.

After a short drive, they returned, and at that time, smoke started pouring out of the tailpipe.

“There is all this white smoke, and the other guy who was in the driveway says, ‘Look, there is oil everywhere,’” Roffey recalled.

He said the two men proceeded to convince him that the engine had blown and the car was worthless.

“To me, at that point, it was total confusion and shock. I was thinking, Well, something must have blown because there was oil everywhere,” said Roffey.

He was asking $7,000 for the SUV, but the men said they could find someone to install a new engine and convinced him to instead take $1,000 to take it off his hands.

Roffey agreed, the men paid him in cash, took an extra set of tires he had for the vehicle and then left.

When he got in the house, he explained what happened to his wife, and that’s when they decided to check their security video.

“I said to Mark, ‘Did they look in the engine? Did they go in the engine?’ He said, ‘No, they never went under the hood.’ I said, ‘Let’s look at the video,’ and then we saw everything, and I said, ‘We’ve been scammed,’” said Crawford.

“This is a scam.”

Eli Melnick, an auto fraud investigator for the insurance industry, said the criminals appeared to know what they were doing by putting oil on the engine so when it heated up, it would create the illusion that the SUV had serious problems.

“We’ve all heard the term buyer beware. Well, this is a case of seller beware,” said Melnick.

“They really conveyed a convincing story to the owner that his car had a blown engine,” he added.

Roffey was upset to have been scammed out of $6,000 and trusted the two men.

“To be taken like this is frustrating. I don’t know how someone sleeps at night after doing this to others,” said Roffey.