Busted By Cops: Innocent Man Falls For Truck Cloning Scam

A deal too good to be true, a man in Butler County, Ohio eagerly snatched up a Ram pickup only to later be busted by cops and told he was scammed. While the truck seemed to be legitimate, and the buyer checked it out to make sure, what the guy didn’t know was it was stolen and the seller cloned it, pulling the wool over his eyes.

After 66 years, a missing family’s station wagon has been found.

The first hint something was off should’ve been the fact someone on Facebook Marketplace was willing to part with their 2021 Ram 2500 Crew Cab Laramie with the 6 1/3 foot bed for just $28,500. It was a great deal, in fact a little too good to be true.

But scammers depend on you getting excited and not checking things over. However, this man did, running the VIN online and even calling a dealership, which confirmed it had recently serviced the truck. So he met up with the seller, handed over the cash, and registered the vehicle with the DMV no problem.

Everything seemed fine until he was going to a doctor’s appointment and police descended, surrounding the truck and ordering him out, as reported by WLWT. Soon, he learned the awful truth it was stolen.

We’ve seen cloned cars fool dealerships, which in turn sell them to unsuspecting customers. But there are ways to detect the fraud, although it takes more work. One quick way is to compare the VIN tag on the dash and driver’s door jamb with the one on the engine block or vehicle frame. The last two are stamped into the metal and can’t be swapped out.

If you don’t want to crawl on the ground or put the vehicle on a lift, plug an OBD II reader in and that will pull up the real VIN.

The guy in this case lost his money and the truck. That could happen to you too if you fall for one of these scams, so be careful.

Image via Andy Mak/Facebook Marketplace