Michael “Mikey” Foley is many things. He’s smart, pragmatic, tough, and determined. He’s streetwise and savvy, and he knows what he wants and where to look for it. He’s exceedingly patient and painstaking in his hobbies, which include hunting for Porsche 911s to buy, as he told me when we first spoke. But for one crucial moment earlier this year, Foley was something else entirely: an idiot. But we’ll come back to that.
In this case, he was after a very specific 911, as it turns out, and out of deference to his already-tough year, I’ll avoid elaborating on what makes his target cars special. Suffice it to say, like many air-cooled Porsches, it’s sometimes still easier to acquire them in Europe than here in the States, even after you factor in the costs of getting them here.
Earlier this year, just days after missing out on a listing for what might have been the perfect car, Foley was ensnared by a scam that would leave him $20,000 lighter—and feeling like a fool.
“Make that the headline,” he told me outright. “I am not one to cower and feel embarrassed by this as I am never and have never been the type to get scammed.”
Famous last words. Over a series of conversations, Foley recounted a scam so elegantly orchestrated that he even complimented the perpetrators on their work after happily wiring $20,000 to an unverified, overseas bank to purchase a car sight-unseen from a seller who, it turns out, was using a fabricated listing as bait to lure in a very particular type of customer. And it worked flawlessly.
“I told that man I loved him,” Foley said. “Can you believe that?”
I can, because if I’ve learned anything from writing this piece, it’s that the one thing protecting people from being scammed is the assumption that they might be. In other words, the instant you start believing you’re immune, you become more vulnerable than ever.
While fraudsters have been doing their thing since long before Al Gore strung all these tubes together, the Internet has made low-effort scams even easier to initiate. They’re so commonplace that your email client is bouncing Nigerian princes and people claiming they’ve stolen your nudes with astounding regularity. But it’s trash like this that leaves us vulnerable to more sophisticated efforts to separate us from our cash.
While those scams may be deliberately unsophisticated, that’s because they’re trying to target unsophisticated marks. Scammers who are after bigger game—say, the sort of buyer who can afford to fire off a five-figure deposit on a decades-old sports car allegedly sitting halfway around the world—have to play on a different level.
That’s how Foley unknowingly went from being the hunter to the hunted. He admits to being particularly vulnerable when he was ensnared by the fraudsters, having just missed the opportunity to buy a near-perfect example of the spec he was looking for.
He found the car on Autorola—a European listing service for used cars. And the kicker? It was a good—but not great—deal. The scammers had priced it just affordably enough to be tantalizing without ringing any alarm bells.
The basic scam is as simple as any fake Craigslist ad. The whole idea is to get money in exchange for a product or service that doesn’t exist—at least not in the possession of the purported seller.
That part’s easy enough. There are plenty of images of vintage 911s floating around the internet. In the vast majority of fake listings we’ve identified just over the past few weeks, the photos were simply ripped off from another auction site—frequently a trustworthy venue, such as Bring a Trailer.
This superficial element of the scam is critical. Scammers are competing for clicks just like anybody else. A high-quality veneer invites you in and begins to lower your defenses. After all, a robust gallery complete with evidence of a service history suggests a transparent seller, right?
Sure, if the “seller” exists.
But Foley’s shields were still up, and he wanted more than pretty pictures as proof of life. When he opened up a line of communication with the purported seller, he was sent a new link to the listing and instructed to reference it going forward. It would also serve as his eventual purchase/payment portal.
This was a critical point in the process; from here on out, Foley was no longer working within the (relatively) safe confines of Autorola’s platform, where he’d originally found the car. Instead, he was playing in the scammers’ private playground.
Once hooked, he was sent additional “documentation” of the car’s existence, including information he used to conduct some research of his own. Among the details was a note that the car’s paint had been corrected at a particular shop, so Foley decided he’d reach out to see if they had any recollection of the car and/or its condition. That paid off big-time, or so Foley believed…
As it turned out, the shop not only worked on it, but the car had (apparently) been owned by it. Another potential red flag turned green. But even then, he was on high alert for BS, because deep down, he knew the cardinal rule of buying a car sight-unseen: don’t. As loud as those alarm bells may have been ringing, the “seller” managed to drown them out by offering to sweeten the deal with what amounted to an all-inclusive package—including 30 days of insurance and temporary registration coverage in Europe.
Imagine being offered what amounts to factory European delivery on a classic 911? I bet you’d be interested too.
“Yep,” he told me via email, “I was gonna take my wife, pick it up in Belgium, drive to Germany, see friends, drive south over the Alps through Switzerland, see friends, hit northern Italy, see friends, shoot over to Monaco, see friends, down through Spain, see friends, back up to Bordeaux, see friends and get to the beaches of Normandy and see what the men who landed there saw under wildly different circumstances, then Paris-friends and drop the thing at a port in Belgium and fly home!”
Foley has a lot of friends, I quickly learned. And with that pitch, he was sold.
Once you peel back the superficial sophistication of it all, the con itself was virtually indistinguishable from a well-curated sales pitch. While they delighted and distracted him with the emotional appeal of this purchase, “vacation,” they were just fattening him up for the imminent slaughter—the request for a $20,000 deposit.
He clicked the button to “buy” the car (still not having given anybody a dime, mind you) and got the obligatory “congratulations!” along with a receipt. So far, so good.
It was right around this point that Foley thought something that has haunted him ever since: “If this is a scam, they’ve earned it.” Skeptical, but not skeptical enough, Mikey.
He wired the money, hyped by the notion that he’d secured his game. But the glow of victory faded when he was sent a request for the balance of the funds. That itself wasn’t alarming, of course, but the remainder was to be sent to a different bank entirely—a massive red flag that brought some of his previous concerns back into full relief.
Foley wasn’t ready to hit the panic button quite yet, but this glaring problem, combined with the fact that the supposed owner had not yet followed up on his lingering questions, had him on high alert. Hoping for the best, he asked for clarification on the bank switcheroo. The scammers promised to look into it, all the while reassuring him that his concerns would be addressed.
Eventually, likely realizing that an increasingly skeptical Foley wasn’t going to blindly wire the remainder of the car’s asking price, they ghosted him. Immediately, Foley retraced his digital steps to see where he’d lost the plot. A message to Autorola’s support team confirmed that the supposed seller had ghosted them as well.
“This no transaction from Autorola,” the reply said. “You have unfortunately been scammed.”
When Foley followed the scammer’s link to their own private listing, he was cooked. From that point on, Autorola had no documentation of any of his activity, and because the transaction was conducted through a third-party wire transfer, Foley had zero recourse with anybody apart from the fraudsters themselves, who could be anybody, virtually anywhere.
The lesson here? Remember your street smarts: Never let them take you to a secondary location.
Luring potential marks outside of the relative “safety” of a secure marketplace or payment portal is an old trick that was pioneered by fraudsters during the early days of online banking.
To get more insight, I spoke with Dr. Hafiz Malik, Associate Dean for Graduate Education and Research at the University of Michigan-Dearborn’s College of Engineering and Computer Science. Malik is well-versed in cybersecurity, deepfakes, and the art (and science) of “multimedia forensics.”
“In the past a lot of banks were like, uh, [phishing] attacks were very common where [scammers] were pretending to be bank websites,” Malik said. “And then banks came up with the idea of dynamically updating websites.”
“What you are telling me is the same old story powered by the new technologies nowadays,” Malik said.
The basic scam here is older than the Internet itself, and because everybody in this situation is operating remotely, the scam is carefully orchestrated to make that a feature for the scammers.
“It is [a] targeted effort, targeted campaign that’s specifically targeting people who are vulnerable because they are limited by the distance,” he said. “And they are not aware of like especially if some website is hosted in France for instance, how those people operate. You understand? What are the checks and balances?”
And don’t make the mistake of believing that a domestic search will spare you from similar heartaches. Since we began working with Foley on this story, he and I have both identified several “dealers” on U.S. soil that are either fictitious or so shady as to be avoided at all costs. Why not name and shame? Well, for starters, we’re not even sure who we’re naming. Since these businesses are either fabricated outright or “borrowed” from legitimate operators, they’re virtually all dead-ends.
Foley even offered me a friendly beer bounty”on the German shop owner with whom he exchanged emails (who has also since ghosted him). My fridge is no better stocked than it was when I began my search.
For all this, I blame AI. In a world where generative AI exists, fraudsters no longer need much in the way of talent or ingenuity to create (or alter) photos that are indistinguishable from the real thing. A photo of a service document might be real, apart from a digitally superimposed phone number that rings instead to a Google Voice number virtually anywhere in the world, and you’d never know it from looking at the image itself.
“Creating these documents and images and everything is just child’s play,” Malik told us. “It’s not so difficult at all.”
And so these “businesses” can come and go at a moment’s notice; by the time you’ve nailed down any identifying information, the trail has long been cold.
Foley connected us with Brian Donahue of Change Driven, a North Carolina dealership specializing in secondhand Porsches. He deals directly with importers on a regular basis, and he said Foley’s story is one he’s heard time and time again from shoppers trying to buy cars sight unseen.
“This has been an ongoing issue that’s unfortunately been getting worse and worse each year as technology improves,” Donahue told us.
The lesson in all this, we’ve learned, is to assume there is no car unless you see it with your own eyes. Obviously, that’s complicated for buyers working from the wrong side of an ocean, as Foley’s predicament has taught us, there’s no substitute for boots on the ground. In other words, if you can’t touch it yourself, recruit somebody trustworthy who can.
For many, that means going through an importer. If you’re smart and your pockets are deep, you’re utilizing one with a solid word-of-mouth reputation whose results you can personally verify. A sketchy or nonexistent importer is no better than a sketchy or nonexistent seller. Either way, you’re probably going to be separated from your money with nothing to show for it.
In the case of too-good-to-be-true type listings, that “probably” becomes a “likely.” An importer with whom Donahue works frequently estimated that as many as 70% of those listings are probably either outright scams or simply starting points for scummy European exporters who hold cars hostage while nickel-and-diming their buyers with fees (legitimate and bogus alike).
But as bleak as all that sounds, even Foley himself cautioned us against doomer-ism. His is a cautionary tale for sure, but a reminder that scammers and salespeople often sound a lot alike. In this case, they hammered him with the same emotional appeals being used to sell you credit cards and insurance policies every day. It wasn’t strong-arming or intimidation that got him. It was good, old-fashioned add-on sales.
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Byron is a contributing writer and auto reviewer with a keen eye for infrastructure, sales and regulatory stories.
