Complaint Review: CARFAX And Autotrader.com - Internet

I am a current employee of Autotrader.com. Our responsibility is just to advertise vehicles on our site (kind of an alternative to the newspaper). We have an entire department dedicated to fraudulent advertisements & do our very best to try & weed them out, but in some cases we do miss them. If you've experienced any type of fraud with regards to any advertisements on the site, please contact us (our contact info is listed on the website), & one of our customer service reps can assist you with that. If an advertisement of a car is reported to us, that is a fraud, it will be removed from the site promptly & the perpetrator will be prosecuted if we find they have broken a law. We want all of our customers satisfied to the best of our ability. Please note that Carfax & Autotrader.com are 2 seperate companies & are in no way connected or related. If you're having a problem with Carfax, you have to contact them.

I recently found an ad in the AutoTrader for a few mini-vans. I jotted down the contact information, and called a few times, and never got an answer back. On 1/28/05, my husband and I drove an hour and 45 minutes to the dealership-Triforce. Once we arrived we noticed that the items listed were not on the "lot" or front yard rather. Once we got to the door there was a note that read "Gone to lunch, will be back in 30 min. Call ###-###-#### if you need help." We had printouts of the vans we wanted and asked about the prices on the cars, the guy gave us a higher price, and the whole deal seemed shady. After seeing that the vehicle I wanted, had an inspection sticker that said "August of 2004" I became upset and was ready to leave. After getting prices of vehicles, I pulled out my sheet of the van that had, keyless entry, CD Player, 77,100 miles and price of 2490.00. The van that was actually there was a piece of junk and had tools laying in the seats with no keyless entry and no CD player. The dealer said "That one was sold 2 days ago." Yeah Right!

A couple things about Carfax's buy-back guarantee & $5,000 cash to you programs: 1) They will reimburse you 10% of the wholesale value of the vehicle, up to $5000!!! 2) Once you've received all their paperwork to get the vehicle purchased back from you, you'll never hear another word back from them! My boyfriend and I purchased a 2000 Harley Davidson Edition F-150 this past may. It's a gorgeous truck. We paid $23,000 for it. Shortly after purchasing it, we went to a local autobody shop to show a friend of ours who had been working there for a few weeks. While we were there, one of the guys who had worked there for years was looking at the truck and noticed a distinctive marking on the driver's side rear wheel. Then he wrote down the VIN #, went into the office, and came out five minutes later with a folder the size of a Webster's Dictionary. In it were receipts that we totaled up to $19,450. The vehicle had been nearly totaled when the previous owner crashed it while drinking and driving. We had purchased a Carfax report that came back clean w/no accidents. When we went back to the dealership, they told us it was out of their hands since we had ordered a Carfax report. This has been four months now, filling out paperwork with Carfax, the state, the county, getting police records. We have all the receipts to back our claim up & Carfax won't call us back. I have filed reports with the Better Business Bureau, state, & we are now having to fork out the $$ for legal council. Carfax has it coming to them BIG TIME! So, I know what you're going through. Carfax is thieves, liars, and cowards!

Jim, I Congrad you on your desision. Carfax is a bussiness that stores a data base it is as good as the data that is entered in the data base. Here are a couple of questions, Who enters the data? At what intervals? well good luck.