Scams

I personally came across both of these scams whilst looking for cars and
caravans in the UK.
Scam 1: Give the Car a Haircut Sir!
Haircut is British slang for taking kilometres off the car odometer.
Also known as "clocking".
Car A
I found the perfect car a good price, the model I wanted. One former
owner low mileage. It was a long drive to the garage but worth it for the
right car. How wrong I was. When I finally got there I found a shabby
tired looking car with worn seats and fittings.
The condition of the car was not consistent with the mileage. The
salesman was also very evasive about the former owner.
Time to walk away! Lesson learnt.
Car B
Two owners 31,000 miles. Privately owned right model and milage. Perfect. But given my experience of a couple of days earlier I thought I would run an RAC vehicle check on it. Glad I did the RAC check it reported the milage as 110,000 miles!
Apparently up to 30% of cars in the UK have their odometers falsified. It's very easy to do with a laptop and some software.
But heres the thing its not illegal to reduce the odometer reading! It's only ilegal to sell a car with a false reading!
There's a major loop hole in the law here I think. I can smile about this now because after these experiences I went to a large dealer and bought a decent car (I hope) and checked its history with an RAC vehicle check.

Scam 2. The ESCROW Caravan Scam.
I was looking for a 6 berth caravan for the family. I found one that looked good and it was about 20% cheaper than similar models on the caravan club website. I contacted the seller via email. Turned out to be a couple of pensioners who no longer wanted to tour. It sounded great until! They said they were living in France but would bring the caravan back to the UK if we were serious buyers. They also mentioned the only payment they would take was via a system called ESCROW. At this point I started to get suspicious so a Googled a few key words. It turns out this is a classic scam. Where you end up paying and the caravan never appears. Now there was no way I would part with money this way but some must fall for it.