About listings on Russian websites

This article is dated as shown. Laws, fees and prices have changed since then. Check the figures before you rely on them.

I want to tell you how people who want to get hold of a quality car from Germany are being cheated. The main thing is to choose the right way of buying. Either buy a car that has already been customs-cleared in Russia, or handle it yourself after all. Many people think, and insist, that cars brought over from Germany and already customs-cleared work out cheaper than bringing one over yourself.

I want to dispel this myth with a concrete example. I do not know how long this listing will stay online, but at the time of writing it is there, http://cars2.auto.ru/cars/used/sale/20647540-b68eb7/, and so that you can see it, I took a screenshot.

One of our clients showed me this car and asked me to find out more about it, since he believes the car is in perfect condition and intends to buy it, but he still has some doubts. He sent me the VIN of this particular vehicle and I got to work. The first thing I did was go into the open BMW archive and look up what this car is. Here is what the archive showed me:

Modellbezeichnung: 318d Ausführung: Europa Typschlüssel: PN11 E-Code: E90 (MUE) Karosserie: Limousine Lenkung: links Türen: 4 Motor: N47D20U0, 2,00l (105kW) Antrieb: Heckantrieb Getriebe: automatisch Außenfarbe: Monacoblau Metallic (A35) Innenraum: Leder Dakota/oyster (LCCX) Produktionsdatum: 23.10.2009 Werk: München

You can see straight away that this vehicle is from 2009, while the listing says 2010. That is not hard to arrange if you have connections in the right offices. Then it got even more interesting.

Code Serienausstattung Standard Equipment Sprachversion niederländisch Language version, Dutch S886A Bordliteratur holländisch On-board vehicle literature Dutch

It turns out this is not a German car but a Dutch one.

So the price is already a little lower, but that is not all. I would no longer have considered buying this car, and the client started to have second thoughts too. If the data we obtained already fails to match what the seller says twice, what comes next? Since Sunday is our day off, I had to turn to the official BMW online database to find out at least the mileage of this vehicle. It turns out people are not even shy about winding back mileages.

here is the data we saw)

Read-out date

Last key update

Mileage

Dealer

20.09.2012 17:15

20.09.2012 17:12

177,991 km

03625

23.11.2011 8:39

23.11.2011 8:28

119,573 km

09.11.2011 10:51

09.11.2011 10:44

117,370 km

15.08.2011 11:50

15.08.2011 11:31

102,075 km

05.08.2011 12:04

05.08.2011 11:56

100,091 km

03.06.2011 15:31

03.06.2011 15:30

88,392 km

02.03.2011 8:15

02.03.2011 8:06

70,886 km

27.01.2011 8:26

27.01.2011 8:07

63,566 km

30.11.2010 13:29

30.11.2010 13:22

53,998 km

03625

06.07.2010 13:00

06.07.2010 12:53

31,266 km

So the man walked away from this car and changed his mind about buying it.

Listings like this are very common, and time and again people show me such offers, saying: look, Denis, buying here is a better deal than through you. A smile spreads across my face, because I know that is only how it looks at first glance. We have had clients who first looked at several cars in Russia and only then turned to us for help and bought a car that suited them.

But this is far from the first case in my experience.

There was this one too.

Our client called me late in the evening and said: “Denis, our car has been sold, it is already on a Russian website, customs-cleared.” I was surprised, because the listing really was online, with photos from mobile.de. I almost believed it, but I knew perfectly well that this car had been reserved in my name for an inspection the next morning, and since we were dealing with an official BMW dealer, that could not have happened. I duly inspected the BMW 635d the next day and signed the contract for our client.

There are dozens of listings like this, and it is far from an isolated case.

And there are those who, when putting a car on a website, pass it off as German, although in fact they brought it in from other countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, France and others). And they get German papers made for it. Obtaining a German registration document (Fahrzeugbrief) takes no more than 2 days and costs around 200 euros. That way the car becomes “German” and goes up in price.

I hope this article is useful; please share it as widely as you can. You can do so by choosing your preferred social network under the Share tab in the menu.

Be careful, do not fall for tricks like these.

Good luck on the roads.

Denis Rem