Scammers on Autotrader UK

I know better than they might like how the scammers operate on Autotrader UK, and I cannot reveal everything, but these screen prints are interesting to see.





The interesting feature is that the scammer has posted a car as a bike if you look at the top right corner of the lower print where I have marked in red.

The reason for this is clear.

http://www.autotrader.co.uk/EDITORIAL/BIKES/news/free_ad.html

FREE ad for wheels worth under £1000

Three weeks free ads for bikes under £1000
You save £33
Thousands of buyers on site

Even more bizarre is that the bike appears in the car section when you perform a search using the site's own search features. Obviously the scammer can post four wheeled bikes for free and have them appear in the car section but, if everyone did that, Autotrader UK wouldn't get any income from adverts. Worse still is that the same group apparently are the ones who 'hack', by some means, the sites of dealers who actually pay to advertise vehicles on the site.

The point being that every day the scammers are plastering the website with these scams and it's the website itself that's enabling the fraud through special offers that are being abused and are putting buyers at risk.

If buyers knew the risk of using the website, none would visit it and there'd be no value in anyone paying to post adverts, especially as the fraudsters aren't paying for theirs. Why pay for a service that the scammer gets for free ?

You can't sell or market a service if fraudsters get it for free and thereby disadvantage those who're paying for it.

This is simple logic.

I also have concerns over some dealers whose pages appear to have been hacked. Undoubtedly some are innocent victims and the harm that hacking does them is immeasurable, but buyers must not have to suffer losses over it. Hacking or inserting fraudulent adverts in to a dealer page gives the scammer the quickest method to insert a high volume of adverts in to the system and it poisons the whole website, as their offers come out as the best deal against those of the honest traders.