Consumer vehicle data provider, MyCarCheck.com has praised Citizens Advice for raising awareness of the issues surrounding logbook loans.
The Bill of Sale financial agreement allows vehicle owners with a steady income to access up to £50,000 ‘selling’ their car’s V5C document to a Consumer Credit Licence holder. Although the lender officially owns the car from there on, the consumer can continue using the car as long as the repayments are kept up.
Difficulties arise when the vehicle is sold on to an unsuspecting used car buyer. The loan company can repossess the vehicle and this can result in an innocent purchaser being out of pocket.
Citizens Advice chief executive Gillian Guy described this as being ‘legalised theft’.
Roger Powell, Divisional Head at CDL Vehicle Information Services, which owns MyCarCheck.com, said: “Citizens Advice is doing a great job raising awareness of this increasing threat to UK used car buyers.
“In many instances the people who take out logbook loans don’t realise it is illegal to sell the vehicle on. They think so long as they keep up the payments everything will be fine. Then, of course, they don’t, and the lender’s representatives are soon knocking on the door of the innocent purchaser. In other instances, out-and-out crooks are exploiting logbook loans to deliberately fleece secondhand car buyers. This is fraud, plain and simple.
“The vehicle provenance industry used to be all about confirming if a car had been written-off or stolen. Today a major part of our business is flagging up that a vehicle has finance debt against it. Consumers need to be aware that the registered keeper of a vehicle – the name on the V5C form, the logbook – is not necessarily the legal owner.
“As a quality provenance check provider, a member of both the Finance and Leasing Association (FLA) and the Motor Asset Registration Service (MARS), we take the use of data very seriously. We need to make sure that whether a consumer is buying an £800 runaround or an £80,000 sports car, they can easily access the data they need to check a vehicle is as described.”
MyCarCheck.com’s parent company, CDL Vehicle Information Services, performs around two million look-ups a week for companies including AutoExpress, CompareTheMarket, Confused.com, Go-Compare, Moneysupermarket, Swiftcover, Tesco Compare and WhatCar?.
