NEW: Optional Email Protection - see below!

Scams:  There are many frauds and fraudsters out there looking for victims. Fraud takes many forms and is too big a subject to be covered properly here but we do want to warn you about one particular scam that affects sellers of higher value items and can become quite common at times.

It works roughly like this (see below too) - you are approached by someone who wants to buy your motorhome possibly unseen by giving you a cheque or bankers draft or some security that is worth more than your sale. You are asked to give them a cheque for the balance or to transfer money into an account. These approaches may come from absolutely anywhere but many originate in South America and in Africa and there is sometimes a UK accomplice or at least the promise of one.  The 'assurance' is that you get the draft to pay into you bank before you hand over the motorhome or part with a cheque.  There are several variants on the story but the outcome is always the same - the cheque or bankers draft will turn out to be worthless and you stand to lose at least the 'balance' but possibly both your motorhome AND the 'balance' money - so you really must beware!!

In part this scam relies on the fact that many people believe bankers drafts, building society cheques, etc are 100% safe - but this is not the case because the banks will claw back the money from your account if they discover (later nb!) that the drafts are fraudulent, stolen, etc.  So do note also that caution is needed over such drafts even when selling to apparently straight UK buyers.

Sites like ours might sometimes attract fraudsters like these because we are highly visible - as you wish us to be to sell your motorhome - and of course our sellers have suitably high value items on offer. This has been an Internet only scam until recently but I'm told that these scams and telephone variants are beginning to affect magazine advertisers too. Values in the £2000-£8000 range seem to be specially attractive to them but higher values might be targeted too.

Another scam is an offer from a trader in some far flung location offering modern vehicles at a fraction of their real value and shipped to the UK for a hundred pounds or so. You are promised the vehicle about seven days after payment - ho ho ho!

We hope this information helps you avoid trouble and remember - if in doubt, don't!

Another scam - sometimes great patience is shown: "Yes we did get lots of scams - the first we nearly fell for. (Without realising it) We were' groomed' over a period of months with questions and telephone calls from an enthusiast. We had phoned him and he us. We checked that the phone line was in the expected part of the world. He promised someone would come to look at the van as we said it had to be looked at first. He promised payment to keep it for him!! Eventually we said 'pay up now or NO SALE.' This resulted in an express delivery - a HUGE white envelope to our bank on the day before the deadline, containing a cheque for 36,000 euros! Our bank contacted us as they knew we were expecting a cheque for only £4500. The cheque was drawn on an EU bank. Our bank rang the EU bank and it turned out that the cheque was from a stolen cheque book.

Naturally within days we were sent emails, saying his accountant had sent the wrong cheque to us. The one we had received was for a different vehicle. He knew we would refund the difference at once!!! we did not reply to any of these on the advice of the bank. Initially the fraud dept of the bank asked for details of all
our emails- but - as no money had actually been stolen from any one they eventually dropped it!

We had opened up a separate bank account for this money to come to us as we had not wanted to give out active details to anyone - so we had no loss either - just a wasted summer of someone enjoying our van and a story to tell.

Other obvious scams followed with an amazing variety of stories - all basically on the same lines - overpaying and requesting payment back. They were easily recognisable and we deleted them at once"

 
Basic ad requirements: We will accept most things but you can make life easier for all of us by following some guidelines.

A moderate amount of text should be plain, left justified, single spaced and word-wrapped. i.e. don't format it as bold, coloured, centred, etc. and don't create new lines with the Enter key. If you do any of these things someone here has to strip it all out and that will delay your ad!  Most people manage with 200 words or less (40 in a magazine!!) but 300 is the absolute maximum.  Pictures should be sent as attachments as jpg or tif preferably not hugely compressed but less than 200Kb in size.  We can accept other formats and much bigger files but publication may then be delayed.  Make sure that children are not included in the picture(s).  Please do not send pictures embedded in Word, most will not convert properly. And no brochure scans please - only real pictures of the actual vehicle for sale.

Try to use the conventions you see on this page, i.e. capitals at the beginning of a sentence and full stop at the end with simple punctuation and spaces after each and every word, comma and full stop. Please DO NOT type all in CAPITALS! - this causes further work and delays this end - and anyway is considered to be SHOUTING in emails!

Email address: Your email body text should contain all the necessary information including your email address, telephone number, town, vehicle make & model and price.  Many of you forget to include your email address.  It may be a good idea to create an email address especially for the ad so that if it attracts scams and spam you can delete it later. If you do create another address you must check it regularly and respond promptly - remember that ad enquiries are like buses nothing comes along for ages and then three come along at once!!  You'd be amazed how many enquiries and complaints we get here from buyers who can't get a prompt answer or even any answer to their emails ... so a missed sale!  Disguised emails are acceptable to but do tell us what you're up to so that we know it isn't a typing mistake - e.g. neill @ motorcaravanning.co.uk or even neill at motorcaravanning dot co dot uk.

NEW: Encoded Email Guard:  For best protection we are now able to encrypt your email on site so that scammers and spammers are unable to automatically 'harvest' your email address from the advertisements. Naturally enough this has costs associated with it so we are offering this extra service as a subscription add-on. It is of course entirely optional and the adverts themselves remain completely free. The initial cost is £15 for a three month period and renewals are just £10 for each additional three months. Please note that this is a defence against automated email harvesting and will not stop activity with addresses already in the possession of the scammers and being circulated amongst them.

So - for maximum protection start with a subscription and keep it going until you ask us to remove the ad!
To subscribe just submit your ad by email as usual but refer to wanting email protection. Then you can also click on the 'Three Months' button on any ad page to make your payment. Please use the quick note field in the checkout process to refer to your vehicle as advertised so we can tie the two together. If there are any problems we will contact you or you can ** ** with any details or concerns - all will be resolved!

** This is an encoded link, the email address is not shown and nor is it buried in our page code so an automated address harvester will not find it - but if a real human being clicks on the link a normal email dialogue will pop up for normal use! 

Price. Adverts will not be accepted without but phrases like "offers based on £4,500" are acceptable.

Please see the ad requirements page too!

Other topics coming soon