A small garage in Fife unwittingly found itself at the heart of a UK-wide car scam after cyber criminals used its address to con victims.
Bonnygate Garage have dealt with around 100 people turning up at their Cupar base looking for vehicles they bought online.
Boss Harry Cairney told how the garage received five calls a day since March from car buyers caught up in the massive fraud.
Criminals set up a fake website that month called Auto Promotions to supposedly sell cars over the internet at bargain prices.
Auto Promotions was a real firm which sold motors from the same Cupar address dating back to 1984, but it stopped trading in 2008.
The sophisticated crooks used that name to appear legitimate and help trick customers into shelling out for second-hand cars they’d never receive.
Retired car dealer Graeme Sheach, who ran the original Auto Promotions and has no involvement with the scam website, said he’s been hit with court orders demanding thousands of pounds from victims.
His son Gordon told a BBC investigation - called The Big Car Con - he’d even hired an “ethical hacker” in a failed bid to sabotage the fraudulent website.
The BBC found large numbers of people searching for cars online had made bank transfers to the phoney company. The victims only realised they’d been conned when the vehicles never materialised.
Some desperate people turned up the Bonnygate Garage to see if they could find the car they’d purchased.
Harry, who has run the garage for ten years, described the situation as “crazy”. He said: “This is a small, little garage where we fix and repair cars on a daily basis. We don’t sell cars from this location at all.”
Asked how many buyers have visited the garage, Harry said: “I’ve lost count there’s been that many. Probably around 100 people have turned up.”
He told of one couple who had driven to his garage for seven hours with a five month old baby looking for their car.
Harry posted a “scam alert” on his garage’s Facebook page in May warning potential victims.
One person posted back: “Wow! I knew it was too good to be true. You literally just saved me a lot of money.”
But another said: “My daughter has just been scammed out of £4k by them, trying to get it back now.”
Cars had been sold from the Cupar address under the name Auto Promotions, but that stopped in 2008 when Graeme Sheach retired.
A decade later, he and son Gordon set up a firm on Companies House to keep the name Auto Promotions within the family, but it sat “dormant” since 2019.
Graeme, 71, told the BBC: “The website address was picked up from a dormant company. My son’s name was also picked up.
“I sold cars all over Scotland. Auto Promotions was a well-known name.
“The way I see it, this has taken away my good name, my good reputation, which I’m furious about.”
Dubai-based Gordon contacted Action Fraud to report his name and company name were being used by the scam Auto Promotions site.
Gordon, 40, told the BBC he contacted an “ethical hacker” to take the website down. He said: “He got back to me to say he was unable to do it. It’s got the right firewalls, it’s been set up properly, and he said to me he couldn’t bring it down which was a bit of blow to us.”
Police were later able to shut down the website, but the culprits behind it have never been caught.
