While it may sound easy for someone to pay you to put an ad on your car, it’s likely to end up costing you. So, take a leaf out of Uncle Sam’s words: Be careful.
in a Consumer Alert The Federal Trade Commission this week issued a warning to the public about so-called “car wrap scams,” in which scammers pay you to shrink your car with ads for popular brands, such as Monster Energy or Pepsi-Cola. As the FTC explains, the offer sounds good in theory, and many scammers say they’ll pay you $600 to $700 per week to drive a car with the ad.
If you accept that, you’ll soon find that things get weird. To pay for your driving ad, scammers will send you a check, often for an amount much higher than what they agreed to pay you, as well as the cost of “installing” the wrapping material on your car. Scammers will tell you to deposit a check, keep your share, and then pay the installer via a payment app, cryptocurrency, or bank transfer.
The FTC says its goal is to get installers access to funds quickly.
How car wrap scams work
But wait, you may ask, how could this be a scam if the check they sent you cashed and the deposit showed up in your bank account? The agency explains that banks have to provide you with funds within days, and it can take weeks for them to discover that a check is fake.
“When they do this, they reverse the transaction and you are forced to pay the bank back while the scammer has the money you sent them,” the FTC said.
In other words, you will pay the scammer out of your own pocket. As for car wrap installers? They don’t exist.
The FTC says this type of scam often targets college students, who may not have a high income and don’t mind making a little extra money. But that doesn’t mean non-students can sit back and relax. Scammers don’t care what your profession is. Sometimes they will even run ads offering paid car wrapping services in the hope that people will contact them.
A car wrap scam story
These scams are not new: they have been around for years.One Reddit user described receiving an email from someone in 2021 who pretends to be the dean of their college Offer them $350 a week to wrap their cars to promote the Super Bowl. The scammers told the students they would pay them for gas, pay to wrap their cars and let them reserve the gig for eight weeks for another advertising campaign.
“I only started to get suspicious when he told me he was sending a check to cover the car wrap instead of the company covering it themselves and sending someone to me,” the Reddit user said. “I first went to the bank for help. I made a mobile deposit so I still had the check and showed it to the teller. They told me the check did look fake and that I should stop talking to this scammer immediately.”
In the Reddit user’s case, there were other warning signs. The emails they received had spelling errors and each new email had a different signature. They also received a check for nearly $4,000, “apparently thousands of dollars more than I was supposed to get. He told me to keep $350 as payment and use the rest for wrapping paper.”
According to the Federal Trade Commission, another sign that you may have been scammed is if you receive a message asking you to deposit a fake check as soon as possible to pay the installer and start work.
“If you receive a message urging you to deposit a check and wire a refund, it is a scam. Every time. Regardless of the story,” the FTC wrote in it Another consumer alert About car wrap scams. “If this was a legitimate car wrap opportunity, would the company pay the car wrap supplier directly instead of requiring you to do so?”