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Motoring Scams In Sri Lanka


tinyman

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Best is to personally import, most of the car importers import “R” – repaired grade which sometimes have very low mileage.

If you buy directly from an auction you will have access to the auction sheet which gives a basic indication about the condition of the vehicle.

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Best is to personally import, most of the car importers import “R” – repaired grade which sometimes have very low mileage.

If you buy directly from an auction you will have access to the auction sheet which gives a basic indication about the condition of the vehicle.

Yes, but then you run the risk of currency fluctuations tax structures changing overnight and what not. I don't think one is better than the other when it comes to direct import Vs. buying from a sale. So its up to the buyer on what his priorities are when buying a vehicle.

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Unbelievable how a large scale vehicle importer/seller does stuff like this. Thanks for sharing OP, and thumbs up on the fact that you did your homework on the car before buying it. The thought of thousands of such cars being on the road right now is just terrifying.

Forgive my ignorance but does the Consumer Affairs Authority usually take such cases seriously and take action against the seller? They seem to be having an online complaint form and a set of listed offences, but I've never heard of a situation where it has actually worked on the favour of a consumer.

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Unbelievable how a large scale vehicle importer/seller does stuff like this. Thanks for sharing OP, and thumbs up on the fact that you did your homework on the car before buying it. The thought of thousands of such cars being on the road right now is just terrifying.

Forgive my ignorance but does the Consumer Affairs Authority usually take such cases seriously and take action against the seller? They seem to be having an online complaint form and a set of listed offences, but I've never heard of a situation where it has actually worked on the favour of a consumer.

I just went through the list of offences, can't we make a complaint under the below mentioned offence,

  1. Removing, altering, obliterating, erasing or defacing of a label or description or price mark of any goods and producing such a good for sale.
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I just went through the list of offences, can't we make a complaint under the below mentioned offence,

  1. Removing, altering, obliterating, erasing or defacing of a label or description or price mark of any goods and producing such a good for sale.

Is the Odometer a label, description or a price mark?

Anyway my point is plain and simple. Nearly all industries in Sri Lanka depend on one factor - stupidity of customers (in economics, we call it 'information asymmetry'). If the car buying public of this country educate themselves and be more analytical, then cheaters and conmen will soon run out of business. This is true in every industry. Take a look at the local TV channels and see the number of infomercials that are aired. Some monkey is selling 20-packs of green tea bags for 300 bucks, claiming it makes people slim! Whereas you can get the exact same thing for like 100 bucks in the market. Another company claims their coconut oil has no cholesterol! And we all know how the famous cricketer is trying to save us from osteoporosis (how many of your elders actually have osteoporosis?)

Where there are fools, there will always be conmen.

Edited by Crosswind
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I just went through the list of offences, can't we make a complaint under the below mentioned offence,

  1. Removing, altering, obliterating, erasing or defacing of a label or description or price mark of any goods and producing such a good for sale.

Isn't No. 14 more like it?

14. False representation that any goods or services are of a particular standard, quality or grade, or that goods are of a particular style or model, or that goods and services have sponsorship, approval, performance characteristics , accessories ,users or benefits that they do not have.

BTW CAA do act in favor of the consumer. When the shop refused to exchange a pair of shoes a niece of mine had bought and broken the next day (she was 80kg++), CAA directed to the shop to give a replacement when she made a complain.

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I just went through the list of offences, can't we make a complaint under the below mentioned offence,

  • Removing, altering, obliterating, erasing or defacing of a label or description or price mark of any goods and producing such a good for sale.

The best thing is to call them up or send an email explaining the situation, they might be able to advise you as to which category the offence falls into.

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regarding the cricketer and osteoporosis, that is a load of utter hogwash. you don't get osteoporotic bone because your calcium levels decline. in fact they're perfectly normal during osteoporosis. anlene aside, even drinking limestone concentrate is not going to make any difference. cons, the lot of them!

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Unbelievable how a large scale vehicle importer/seller does stuff like this. Thanks for sharing OP, and thumbs up on the fact that you did your homework on the car before buying it. The thought of thousands of such cars being on the road right now is just terrifying.

Forgive my ignorance but does the Consumer Affairs Authority usually take such cases seriously and take action against the seller? They seem to be having an http://www.caa.gov.lk/web/index.php?option=com_consumercomplaint〈=en'>online complaint form and a http://www.caa.gov.lk/web/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=114&Itemid=108〈=en'>set of listed offences, but I've never heard of a situation where it has actually worked on the favour of a consumer.

Consumer affairs authority helped one of my cousins to get a warranty cover from a phone shop at bambalapitiya. Issue was that they refused to replace a disply within warranty period saying it's not covered. Also they have wasted 2 weeks saying various lies, ect. So put a complaint and they held a inquiry involving both parties . Shop owner had to replace the disply with genuine one plus said that chargers, headsets, also comes under warranty and sellers just cant put those terms on consumers. ( Funny part was that after the complaint shop owner tried his level best to get rid of the inquiry saying " malli api kohomahari hadala dennum, ada ennawada" and before that whenever we tried to contact him , their answere was "boss busy, wadakata gihilla ,").
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Best is to personally import, most of the car importers import “R” – repaired grade which sometimes have very low mileage.

If you buy directly from an auction you will have access to the auction sheet which gives a basic indication about the condition of the vehicle.

Some of R grade vehicles has better condition than 4.5 vehicle. R mean replaced, most of the R comes in side fenders, bonnet, side doors. Conditions depend on the level of accident they had. Most of them are totally replaced and same as newly built one. e.g side fenders, they will replace any inside damaged parts also

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One of my office colleague is looking for a small size car and found a unregistered Passo 2007 model with an odometer reading of 33k. We had a doubt on the mileage as the car should have done less than 10k per year till it's export to SL in early 2011. the other odd fact we noticed that as to why the car has not got sold for more than 2.5 years. So we requested for JAAI certificate from the sellers.

JAAI dated 20 Aug 2010 clearly indicated a odometer reading at the time of inspection to be 33,117km, so I tried contacting JAAI to verify the certificate. After failing to get thru via call, wrote to them on info at jaai . or .jp with the certificate no, car make model YOM and I intentionally put the Odometer reading 20,000km less than what was in the certificate (Just to make sure they respond).

today morning I received the response, like this

Dear ...............
The odometer reading-13,117km which you said in your e-mail is different from our record.
Our record of the Mileage at the inspection time is 83,117km.
thank you
N.OKANO

JAAI

if you need to know the seller of this car, refer to the topic tag

Can u please state the contact e-mail address of the JAAI clearly and thanks for sharing this info

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Unbelievable how a large scale vehicle importer/seller does stuff like this. Thanks for sharing OP, and thumbs up on the fact that you did your homework on the car before buying it. The thought of thousands of such cars being on the road right now is just terrifying.

Forgive my ignorance but does the Consumer Affairs Authority usually take such cases seriously and take action against the seller? They seem to be having an online complaint form and a set of listed offences, but I've never heard of a situation where it has actually worked on the favour of a consumer.

Good luck seen any results after making a complaint against the said organization. This is peanuts compared to the stunts they've been pulling in the local financial industry.

Best option is to educate ourselves and the others like crosswind has mentioned.

Edited by xXx
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  • 4 weeks later...
Buyers be aware this car is clocked

http://www.autolanka.com/ad.asp?ID=000133305

this car was previously owned by a close friend of mine who was the second owner and has 175,000 km in the meter when he departed with the vehicle.

Did your friend buy (and then sell) the car on open papers? The number of previous owners is not something you can easily change.

And not that we don't believe you, but your friend having some form of service record or whatever would help substantiate your/his claim on mileage.

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Buyers be aware this car is clocked

http://www.autolanka.com/ad.asp?ID=000133305

this car was previously owned by a close friend of mine who was the second owner and has 175,000 km in the meter when he departed with the vehicle.

I think we all shouldn't be bothered about the mileage of used vehicles when we buy them in Sri Lanka as almost every clocks have fake readings now. I recently bought a car manufactured in year 2000 which has just 94K on clock which is totally unrealistic value. I told the seller that this is changed & he just simply replied me that he is not aware of it :speechless-smiley-004:.

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Did your friend buy (and then sell) the car on open papers? The number of previous owners is not something you can easily change.

And not that we don't believe you, but your friend having some form of service record or whatever would help substantiate your/his claim on mileage.

It was not sold on open papers so the claim in the ad is false.

I dont think he has any documents to back it. The guy used the car for daily travel for the last 10 years.

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It was not sold on open papers so the claim in the ad is false.

I dont think he has any documents to back it. The guy used the car for daily travel for the last 10 years.

Doesn't he has any eco test result sheet in previous year? any car service record or wheel alignment etc...? if he has driven it for 10 years or is this a false accusation?

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Whether anyone want to believe no not is not my issue.

My friend who sold the vehicle has given all the service records to the buyer and do not have anything in his possession to prove it and as he is not the owner anymore he and doesn’t care.

My motive of brining this into light is in the interest of any innocent party who might believe this false claim and think that he is buying a low mileage car.

Anyway for what it is worth the car was very well looked after by my friend and despite having over 175k on the clock it was in very good nick.

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Whether anyone want to believe no not is not my issue.

My friend who sold the vehicle has given all the service records to the buyer and do not have anything in his possession to prove it and as he is not the owner anymore he and doesn’t care.

My motive of brining this into light is in the interest of any innocent party who might believe this false claim and think that he is buying a low mileage car.

Anyway for what it is worth the car was very well looked after by my friend and despite having over 175k on the clock it was in very good nick.

Chill bro, we've seen you around here for a while and believe you. We aren't calling you a liar. I can understand that you would just give away all paperwork and stuff to the buyer along with the car rather than hoard them in your house; I would too.

Maybe we can all make some phone calls to the new seller and ask him about the missing 100k... What do you guys think?

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We go on talking about a single incident here because kush brought it to our notice, but this is a very common occurrence in SL. Don't you think that the DMT is responsible for preventing this? After all, it is an issue tied to the safety of a vehicle and that is why tampering the odometer is prohibited in some countries. All DMT needs to do is to note the mileage at the time of registration (not much can be done on used vehicles but still they can still rely on jaai or something) and then update the record each year on the revenue licence when it falls due for renewal. To put in simply on record DMT is not doing their job. :sleeping-smiley-008:

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We go on talking about a single incident here because kush brought it to our notice, but this is a very common occurrence in SL. Don't you think that the DMT is responsible for preventing this? After all, it is an issue tied to the safety of a vehicle and that is why tampering the odometer is prohibited in some countries. All DMT needs to do is to note the mileage at the time of registration (not much can be done on used vehicles but still they can still rely on jaai or something) and then update the record each year on the revenue licence when it falls due for renewal. To put in simply on record DMT is not doing their job. :sleeping-smiley-008:

Actually I believe the emmissions test captures this information and the emissions test information is later captured in the DMT. So it's not so much a issue of 'capturing it' as much as it is linking it.

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To my knowledge following could be used to verify the mileage of a second hand car.

Last emission test

Service records agents/ some companies print the mileage in the receipts (always better to verify this with the agent/ service station)

Best would be to check the ECU mileage using diagnostic tools (I was told that this could not be tampered with)

If prospective buyers get educated we could at least reduce this menace.

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Members,

Odometer (Digital) adjusting was first started in our country by a Computer hardware and software genius.

Japanese invited him to come to Japan. He did not go as he is wealthy man in our country. He wants do more research here.

ECU mileage using diagnostic tools. Also can be adjusted at present. Our Odometer adjusters had found the way to do same.

Originally they used to bun the first figure, now they have total knowledge to reduce the Odometers.

There is nothing on computers software people can do in this world,

Sylvi Wijesinghe.

Edited by Sylvi
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