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Audio Transcript

Mollie Halpern: Cyber criminals are using a new tactic to drive fraudulent vehicle sales.

The FBI says the scammers are only accepting gift cards from reputable online commerce websites as payment.

Task Force Officer Janice Jolly of the FBI Oklahoma City Field Office…

Janice Jolly: The most important thing is, do not purchase a vehicle with a gift card. Anytime the seller would want you to purchase gift cards to pay for a vehicle, it is a scam—a hundred percent of the time.

Halpern: The fraudsters are using online ads to sell vehicles—which they do not actually own—for prices below cost.

They use excuses to explain away the discount and claim the sale is time sensitive.

Jolly: Just because you’re being deployed or you’re going through a divorce doesn’t mean you want to give your vehicle away. So if it’s too good to be true, it is.

Halpern: The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, or IC3, received nearly 27,000 complaints with losses of more than $54,000,000 related to this crime between May of 2014 and December of 2017.

To learn how to avoid becoming a victim and to report the crime, visit www.fbi.gov/carscams.

With FBI, This Week, I’m Mollie Halpern of the Bureau.