Jane Torres is the executive director of the Houlton, Maine, Chamber of Commerce. Recently, she started getting calls from confused buyers around the country asking her about a business called VNKC. The classic car retailer was supposed to be located in the city but when she looked, she couldn’t find any trace of its existence.
By the fourth caller, she decided to forego looking through files and instead got into her car and drove out to the company’s supposed address. Instead of a classic car dealer, she found a garbage company and a tree trimming service, neither of which had ever heard of VNKC LLC, according to the Bangor Daily News.
That went a long way to explaining why the people calling her were complaining that they had never received the classic vehicles that they were buying. The consumers were located in Oklahoma, California, Florida, and South Carolina, and all were ghosted soon after they deposited any amount of money.
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One buyer, who asked to remain anonymous, said he was shopping for a 1987 Chevrolet Blazer. He laid out just how thorough VNKC had been, explaining that he had been in talks with the company for five weeks by the time he put down a $500 deposit on the SUV.
“I have a copy of the title, the bill of lading, the bill of sale, the VIN number,” he said. “It never arrived. After the shipping date, the number I had been calling went dead.”
Alarmingly, although the VNKC listing for the vehicle has now vanished, when he looked for it on Cars2Search, a legitimate website, he found it again in Naples, Florida.
Similarly, Diana Kirkpatrick, of Aiken, South Carolina, said she found a Nissan Figaro on Auto Trader that she was interested in. Like the first buyer, she was told that if she put the money for the vehicle down, in escrow, she would receive the vehicle and could return it if it wasn’t to her liking. Like the first buyer, her car never arrived.
The Blazer’s buyer says that he is now working with the FBI, as well as Oklahoma’s attorney general, and that he has been in touch with Maine’s attorney general’s office. Strangely, the latter said it had not received any complaints, but that victims could reach out to its Consumer Protection Division.
Although the people behind this scam have not yet been found, the ISP for VNKC LLC’s website was registered with a Lithuanian internet service provider. Unfortunately for the victims, though, scams like these are easier to perpetrate than they are to investigate, and police suggest that public education and awareness are the keys to preventing them. That means that, for now, this serves as just another reminder that shoppers have to be extra careful when buying a used vehicle.
