09/11/2009

Selling your car can be a real headache especially when you encounter the latest consumer pitfall - car matching.

Kayleigh Sheed from Essex discovered how car matching works when she was trying to sell her Citroen Saxo through one of the trade magazines.

She received a phone call from a company called Vehicle Media Advertising who'd seen her advert which sounded like it was going to make the whole sale easy.

"I was contacted by Vehicle Media Advertising offering me a deal for £89.99 and they basically said that they had people that wanted to buy my car and they were arranging with me to be in tomorrow to view my vehicle the next day.

"As long as I paid them the £89.99 they would put me in contact with people that wanted to buy the car… All I needed to do was pay the fee."

She says that the company seemed genuine.

But Kayleigh was to find it wasn’t quite as easy as she thought when no-one turned up. Now she feels angry and let-down:

"We are really angry we feel like we have been completely ripped off. We paid a substantial amount of money considering the advertisement we already paid for was only £30 to then pay £89.99. I think it is disgusting to get absolutely nothing from it and we just want our money back."

Inside Out has found that car matching is a widespread problem.

So we tried our own car sale to find out what it's all about.

We took an Alfa Romeo which was in pretty good condition with 100,000 miles on the clock. Our estimates valued it at around £1,300.

So we decided to advertise it.

The same company - Vehicle Media Advertising from Hertfordshire that rang Kayleigh - saw our advert and got in touch.

Their salesman told us that buyers contact them through the internet to let them know what type of vehicle they are after.

Then the company finds them a vehicle about 50 mile radius of their own home.

They then charge the seller a small fee for the service - a one off payment of around £89.99.

This is before they introduce the seller to the potential buyer.

In our case they said they could get us £1,600 for the car - more than we expected.

It sounded too good to be true - £300 more than we wanted so we paid up to see what would happen.

Then we gave the company a month to find a buyer for us.

Despite the assurances and the fee no potential buyer phoned or showed up after 28 days.

Trading Standards warn people to be careful about car matching companies in general.

In the past Hertfordshire Trading Standards have fully investigated a number of car matching companies and prosecuted those that have broken the law. Vehicle Media Advertising deny any breach of the law.

We door-stepped Vehicle Media Advertising who gave Kayleigh her money back.

Matthew Eaton of Vehicle Media Advertising said the company never guarantees to offer more money to sellers.

He could not explain why his sales team claimed to have buyers lined up who did not materialise. Mr Eaton couldn’t say how many cars his company has sold but sent details of some happy customers.

The lesson for anyone selling a car is that if a deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is and should be treated with caution.