Vehicle History Report Scam - Kijiji

Background

In the fall of 2023 I decided to sell my car because I rarely used it.

I decided to create an ad for it on Kijiji and allowed my phone number to be posted on the advertisement. What followed was a flood of SMS messages each attempting to run the vehicle history report scam. The way the vehicle history report scam works is the scammer creates a website that allows you to purchase a history report (think a service similar to CARFAX). The website might even give you a genuine report, however even if you recieve a report, the scammers now have access to your personal information (credit card etc.) and they also make money by overcharging for the report if they gave you a genuine report. You can read more about the vehicle history report scam here.

The Scams

I have created a page for each of the scams/scammers that were run, with the complete messaging thread in HTML form.

The following links are to reports on the scams, not to the scams themselves!

• DigitalEliteCheck.com - The first one I recieved. Still ongoing!
• RoadHistories.com - WheelsHistories.com
• VinFaxReport.com
• CarInspect.online
• CanadaVinPro.ca
• eCarVinCa.com - Scammer was incompetent and exposed their identity, got spooked and tried to destroy the evidence
• CanadaVinCheck.ca
• MyAutoReport.com
• VehicleAudit.ca
• DriveTrusty.com - Was advertised by 2 different numbers. The most recent of which was either a bot, or had terrible reading comprehension.
• AutoCarInspectors.com

How the SMS messages got turned into HTML

I used SMS Gate from F-Droid to export my SMS messages to a directory. I then transferred them to a desktop and used this custom tool I made to convert them into HTML fragments I could paste into the pages you will find here.

The Tech Companies

The websites the scammers were sending me were hosted on various cloud hosting providers, and I reported the the hosting companies and their domain registrars.

Not all the hosting companies cared and bothered shutting down the sites. And for the hosting companies that did bother to stop hosting the scam sites, they seemingly stopped caring after a while.

I plan to have a more in depth review and overview of how each company (Amazon, Hostinger, DigitalOcean, etc.) added here eventually