Maria Tucci, a retired Montreal-area service consultant, wanted to help her student daughter by getting her a used car. She saw the ad on Facebook Marketplace for the 2018 Nissan Versa that had low mileage, looked extra clean, and was supposedly well-maintained. “It drove good when I tried it. So … a perfect car for my daughter,” says Tucci from her home. She paid $8,400 cash to the seller, who pretended it belonged to his aging mother, who was barely driving it. But by the time Tucci got home with it, the car was not running so well anymore. “I couldn’t even make it to the corner. I had to come back because it was clunking,” she recalled. She called the seller immediately. “He hangs up on me ... And I tried three, four times. I sent him text messages. Nothing.” She took her car to a nearby Nissan dealer, who confirmed that the transmission had to be replaced. The cost of repair was $6,000. According to George Iny, from the Automobile Protection Association, Tucci was likely the victim of a so-called curbside seller — a form of car dealers working without permits. “So they’re selling cars often out of their driveway or they offer to meet you at a public location,” explains the veteran consumer advocate. “They’re buying junk from dealers that often don’t want to retail them their vehicles. They wouldn’t retail themselves and then they will sort of cosmetically clean them up maybe a little bit, maybe hide some deficiencies and they’ll lure you by telling you that it’s their personal vehicle,” Iny said. Tucci admits the seller, who goes by the name Sean Ricardo, was convincing. She didn’t bother getting a mechanical inspection, and she said she saw the Carfax report confirming the car was legit, but soon realized the document provided by the seller was missing pages. Tucci went to police who told her to inquire about the car’s true past by checking all past transactions on the SAAQClic web site — a service provided for a $15 fee. By entering the car’s serial number, every past transaction involving the car shows up. Tucci discovered the car had in fact nine previous owners. The last one was a Montreal-area scrapyard — a sign, Iny says, that the car was probably worthless. Iny says the Nissan cars from that era have a history of transmission failures. The repair is so costly, that owners simply dispose of them. “With a car like this one, the cost of the repair is almost the value of the car,” says Iny, pointing that the new transmissions cost an average of $6,000, barely less than what Tucci paid for the car. CTV News did a search on Marketplace and found that the man who sold the car to Tucci is still listing a similar Nissan from the same year. When CTV News reached out to the seller, who claims to live in Rawdon, Que., he hung up the phone. In a text message, he said of Tucci: “If she has any issues she is welcome to take me to small claims court.” Tucci says she plans to do just that and has decided to go public with her story to warn others.
