QuestionHi,
I have purchased infiniti g35S during 11/3/2009 from a dealer. At the point I have verified the CarFax report and came out clean. The report indicated no damage or accidents to the car on car fax report.
Later in the year 10/27/2010 I have again verified the carfax report for my car so that I can sell it, and the report was clean and did not indicate any kind of damages.
Today, 8/24/2011 I wanted to sell my car and visited Lexus dealer. The dealer generated car fax report and to my horror the report indicated a structural damage reported in the year 11/5/2009. This is during the period I purchased the car. The carfax report given to me by the dealer never had such history. The record showed the same report when I generated the report on carfax.
At this point I am totally confused since my carfax report never indicated such damages ever while buying the car in the year 2009 or 2010.
Please kindly suggest me on what I need to do now. I never had an accident ever since I bought the car.
Answer Hello Kaushik,
This is not an insurance question, but I will try to point you in the proper direction.
If the dealer that sold you the car is altering Carfax reports, that is a serious issue. If you have not contacted Carfax directly, I would do this. If their reports are being altered, I would assume they would want to know that.
I would also suggest that you contact the appropriate regulatory agency. In Florida the state Attorney General's office deals with business scams. If this is an organized scam, it is doubtful that you are the only victim. I would encourage you to find the contact information for your state's attorney general to see if they take complaints and enforce these types of things. If they do not, certainly they can refer you to the agency that does.
Finally, while I am not an attorney, if you can substantiate that the dealer behaved improperly in providing you with a phoney report, you might have a civil action against them for the loss in value of your car. You would need a legal opinion on that.
Having said all that, your time frame is interesting because you say you ran your own car fax report that agreed with the dealer's report? If you are certain of that,you need to uncover why the Carfax report did not include such vital information. Perhaps it takes enough time to update the information, that it was not included in the report when you checked the car originally. Probably the best way to verify that is to call Carfax directly and ask them how long it takes to update a report.
One other thing... and this could be the most important of all. You need to verify the information on your own. Take your car to a reputable body shop and ask them to search for the structural damage that is indicated for your car. They can do this easily. It's not out of the realm of possibility that the Carfax report is just wrong. Who knows - someone may have entered the wrong serial number!
You'll need to do some detective work of you own to attempt to figure this out. Good luck.
Jane Pytel
http://SolutionsForYourInsuranceClaim.com
http://FloridaAutoInsuranceCentral.com
