HOLLYWOOD, Fla. — A South Florida man thought he was getting a good deal on a sleek SUV only for police to confiscate his new car days later.
It turns out the car he bought was stolen.
It was fall of last year when Adrian Blejdea was in the market for a new ride.
He came across a black chevy suburban on Facebook Marketplace that was listed for $45,000 dollars.
Blejdea ran the vehicle’s VIN number and it came back clean, and the title matched.
The seller’s registration and paperwork seemed legit.
“I did my research, everything seemed fine so I bought the car and registered it,” said Blejdea.
They negotiated a deal and Blejdea gave the seller $35,000.
He drove off in the SUV and thought all was well, until three days later.
“The radio wasn’t working, so when I hooked up the GPS to the car the next day, Hollywood police found me,” said Blejdea.
According to a Hollywood police incident report provided by Blejdea, an officer ran the license plate and there were big red flags on a Carfax report.
The incident report says during the traffic stop the officer “Inspected the public VIN plate of the vehicle which I immediately identified as being fraudulent.”
Police found there was no real dealership history for the SUV, and the paperwork was fake too.
The title was linked to a car from a dealership in Kentucky, but that VIN was never in their inventory.
But that’s not all.
During officers’ inspection of the SUV, they found another fraudulent VIN that “appears to be a clone of a legitimate Canadian vehicle.”
Hollywood police determined Blejdea was the victim of something called VIN swapping, where crooks take a legitimate VIN number and place it on a stolen car.
When police dug deeper, they discovered the car was originally reported stolen in Oklahoma and somehow made it to South Florida and eventually sold to Blejdea.
It’s an elaborate scheme happening from coast to coast, one so sophisticated the FBI does not have precise nationwide statistics.
For Blejdea, the car he thought was his, was seized by Hollywood Police.
Now he is out of a car and thousands of dollars.
“I don’t trust anything anymore,” said Blejdea. “I’m always double checking and searching and I just want to make sure that whoever I’m talking to or they tell me something it’s not fraud because you hear a lot of stories but you don’t think it would happen to you.”
Blejdea had a take out a loan, which he is still paying back, and on top of that he bought another car to get around and work for Uber.
He is hoping somehow he will get his money back.
Ways to protect yourself include running a Carfax and try into cross reference the VIN numbers in multiple locations, while looking into professional inspection services is also an option.
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