This month Peter warns of a potentially costly online scam that could end up costing you £70.
These days, a lot of information which has previously been charged for can be found free online. Sometimes, though, things online aren’t quite what they seem, and a ‘service’ which you think is free turns out not to be. Usually, you are alerted to this at a late stage when you are asked to enter card details. However, a CM reader recently alerted me to one which doesn’t work this way. The site is called carrate.co.uk and it provides car valuations.
To provide a bit of context here, a number of firms do this. Probably the best-known is Parkers, whose website provides a basic price-range valuation free or for £4.99 a range of prices taking into account mileage, optional extras where they affect value, plus three separate figures for dealer, private sale and part-exchange price. What’s more, that £4.99 gives you 24 hours access and you can look up as many valuations as you like in that time. And for £9.99 you get a month’s access. There are other services too offering similar value, and of course if you’re sneaky you can get a pretty fair idea of a car’s trade value by looking at similar cars listed by auctions, many of which include trade prices.
Carrate.co.uk is different. The front page simply says: ‘Get a valuation in seconds’ with a British numberplate input area underneath and a click-box to continue, with ten lines of tiny small-print under that, and a tick-box to the side. This box is already ticked, so to not accept the terms you need to untick it – but when I tried, unticking the box seemed to make no difference and I still get through to the next stage. In any case, small print is, of course, the sort of thing that people don’t generally bother reading. This one, though, needs reading, because buried within the small print are the words “The service costs 70 GBP”.
Yep, you read that right – getting just one vehicle valuation from this company will cost you £70 – though because they write it as 70 GBP it probably isn’t as obvious in the skim-read which is the most that anyone generally does with T&Cs. You also don’t pay by card beforehand (which, of course, would make buyers fully aware of the cost); rather, the valuation, is accompanied by an invoice which you are expected to pay, by transferring money to a stated bank account, within 14 days – or you get charged an extra £20. And if you don’t pay within 30 days, the matter is referred to “an appropriate debt collection institution.” How this aspect actually pans out I don’t know, because I didn’t take it that far, though it’s possible that a legitimate debt collector could be used, though they should of course carry out due diligence first.
Where does the money go?
The bank account in question has the sort-code 23-14-70. This belongs to a firm ca
