Car rental scam, stealing hundreds of millions of dong

Spent 20 million VND, scammed out of 200 million VND

Reporting to Lao Dong Newspaper, Ms. Nguyen Thi Hong (name changed) said that within 15 minutes of posting a warning about self-driving car rental scams on Facebook fanpages and groups, her posts mysteriously disappeared. “I don’t understand if the subjects reported me so that Facebook could remove my post or not? I really want to warn many people about this scam,” Ms. Hong shared.

Ms. Hong and her husband have been running a self-drive car rental service for several years. A week ago, a couple contacted her and asked to rent a self-drive car for 2 days. After signing the contract and delivering the car, Ms. Hong took a photo of both of their ID cards; and kept the 20 million VND deposit.

After only a few hours, Hong and her husband discovered that one GPS tracker had suddenly disappeared, leaving only one remaining. On the night of January 9, Hong's family followed the GPS tracker to Bac Giang province and discovered that the car had been sold to someone else. Surprisingly, the license plate, car lock, registration papers... of the car she rented had been replaced with fake papers.

"I tried to insert the spare key of the car but it could not start because the lock had been replaced.All the information of the car had been changed.At that time, the buyer of this car presented the car purchase papers for 200 million VND, which were handwritten.Initially, when I shared the incident, this person did not cooperate and returned the car" - Ms. Hong said.
After that, both parties brought the car to the police agency of Bac Giang province to report, this car was also sealed there.Recently, her family returned to Bac Giang to receive the car and bring it back to Hai Phong.

Rental car location monitoring

During the process of handling the case, the police agency made many recommendations to Ms. Hong and many people who do business in long-term self-drive car rental services. Accordingly, when making a car rental contract, car owners must require the renter to leave original identification documents such as CCCD, the car rental contract should be certified by the authorities. Car owners also need to require the renter to deposit money, must leave valuable assets, possibly a motorbike with official documents.

The police agency especially noted that for self-driving rental cars, car owners need to install a GPS device on the car and regularly monitor the GPS to check their assets. If the car has a GPS device installed, from the second day onwards according to the car rental contract, the car owner discovers that the car is stationary and not moving, they need to search for the car around the place where the signal is emitted to detect the car. Because then the car can be mortgaged. If this is the case, the car owner needs to immediately notify the nearest police agency and provide documents proving the car ownership for support, absolutely do not call to contact the subject.

The police also noted that cars are assets that must be registered for ownership. The procedure for transferring ownership of a car must have the signature of the owner. Sales transactions with entities other than the owner are not legally valid according to the provisions of the 2015 Civil Code.