Beware of scammers "exporting" vehicles out of France

[SalvadorP]

I don't know if this post should be here or on a general page.

I have just come across a new (at least to me) type of scam. I have found a few almost too good to be true kinda deals advertised in Portugal during this week. Upon contacting the seller, someone replies with extremely broken (like google translator broken) Portuguese with the same story with slight variations.
"We are a couple of portuguese living in France. We just decided to move definitively to France and we have too many cars and that's why we are selling our 240/740/940 for such a low price. The car is already at the transport company, all you have to do is paying half the cost of transport."

I am no stranger to entertaining scammers because I like to know how they operate, so I went along with some of them giving them outrageous Portuguese names and addresses (for reference my english based scam baiting name is Chrystal Methany). They finally asked for the sum of 479 for shipping which I was supposed to transfer to the freight company. I played dumb and pretended to understand that I had to transfer the 479 plus the value of the car (1500), 1979€ to the "transport company". They preceived this as a golden opportunity to scam me out of 2k, instead of the meager 500 they were looking after at first. So the deal changed, now I was supposed to transfer the almost 2k, like I suggested.

So finally I receive an iban with what sounds like a portuguese name (Diogo Andre), maybe spanish and "TYT group" in front of the name of the account. The account is from an online bank in Spain. Most likely the name is the real name of the account owner. The guy is that dumb.

So I have denounced this to the bank and made TYT aware that someone is using there name and logo to scam people. I might denounce them to the spanish authorities tomorrow. Best thing that could happen is the account gets banned and the person gets investigated. Maybe it's not the first time they do it. Perhaps some victims might get refunded.

Again. This wasn't a car advertised in France, but in Portugal. Only after contacting the seller I got to know the "being in france" detail. It can happen to anyone browsing for car deals locally.
So I suspect this scam must be happening in other countries too. We all think we aren't that stupid to fall for stuff like this, but these guys are always inovating and we always must be aware of how they operate. Beware of scammers. Stay safe.