A Caerphilly County Borough car dealer has been fined by magistrates for giving false information about the vehicles he was selling.
Van Bank Limited, based in Wattsville and its director John Strain were prosecuted after Caerphilly County Borough Council’s Trading Standards team carried out a forecourt inspection and compared the advertising on the vehicles to that on the company’s website.
Trading Standards found differences between the information advertising the vehicles online and the vehicles’ correct details.
This included four offences for providing factually incorrect information about the number of former owners of vehicles, four offences for advertising a lower price online than the cars were up for sale for in reality, and one offence for providing factually incorrect information about the expiry date of MOTs.
Van Bank Limited was fined £900 by Caerphilly Magistrates’ Court and ordered to pay £200 costs to Caerphilly County Borough Council, and a £15 victim surcharge. John Strain was given a 12-month conditional discharge.
Councillor Lyn Ackerman, cabinet member for the environment said: “With consumers increasingly using the Internet to find items such as cars to buy, it is important that web descriptions do not misinterpret the truth about the vehicles, and mislead customers before they get to the forecourt.
“Misleading customers in this way means that they are not fully informed and may be swayed into visiting to look at cars for sale under false pretences.
“Our Trading Standards team work tirelessly to ensure that consumers are protected against this type of offence, and I am pleased that the court has emphasised the seriousness of this offence in the fine it imposed.”
Seems like Van Bank Limited changed their company name and Directors but not their fraudulent sales techniques!
Last September (2015) I purchased a van for £11102.02 from Lonsdale Vehicle Sales in Wattsville, Newport (earlier Van Bank Limited).
It was a box van and I was told by Dave the salesman that it had come from Harrods and was very clean. I paid over the phone by card and also paid for a warranty and delivery to my drivers address in Nottingham.
I was desperate for the van as I had already taken a huge amount of delivery bookings and employed a driver who had been recently made redundant to do the work for me.
On the Saturday morning that the vehicle arrived, my driver sent me a message to say that he was very concerned about the vehicle, It had a large gouge up one side and was an ex Graham’s the plumbers vehicle not Harrods at all.
I immediately contacted Dave at Lonsdale who was so abusive that I sat in tears, I couldn’t believe that a company would substitute the vehicle and try to fob me off with an inferior one in its place and then when I called them to discuss it be so aggressive.
I was also in a terrible situation that I had taken thousands of pounds worth of delivery bookings and if I returned the vehicle immediately I would have to return all of the money that I have taken for the deliveries, still pay my driver and also receive terrible feedback online for my business, I had also insured the vehicle which when you are running a courier firm is very expensive and and I stood to loose hundreds of pounds changing the vehicle.
After several hours of abuse and me being in tears, the owners at Lonsdale agreed that they would repair the vehicle once I could get it back to their garage several hundred miles away and would tax it for six months as gesture of goodwill. I was so brow beaten I didn’t know what else to do, but then the next day started more and more aggressive abuse and dishonest behaviour.
First of all they tried to put the van back in their name at the DVLA, then they kept texting me and writing to me telling me that they were taking the vehicle from the road. I explained that I had paid for a vehicle and that although they hadn’t delivered the vehicle that I had purchased I had been backed into a corner to use it and that it was full of third party goods. The reply from Lonsdale was that they didn’t care and would be holding the goods also.
Weeks of abuse and threatening emails, texts and letters followed, I was never given a date to have the vehicle repaired and in fact it never was repaired. Approximately 6 weeks after I purchased the van, the engine totally blew up in Central London. It was towed to a garage where it was deemed to be beyond economic repair and it wasn’t covered by the warranty that I had been sold by Lonsdale and so I wrote to Lonsdale’s solicitors rejecting the vehicle as not fit for purpose. They immediately collected the vehicle, repaired it and put it back up for sale on Ebay, then about one month after this they removed the item from Ebay and sent a letter the next day including an invoice for over £1200 including nearly £50 for non payment of the bill that I hadn’t ever been sent before saying that they had recovered the vehicle ‘as per my instruction’ and I needed to pay this money to get it back.
I informed them that I rejected the vehicle as not fit for purpose and had not given them any instruction whatsoever to recover the vehicle and repair it. Nor had they at any point previous to recovering the vehicle had they informed me that they would not be taking the vehicle back as unfit for purpose or that there would be a charge to recover it. I had obviously rejected the vehicle and they had repaired it and put it back up for sale, they then changed their mind almost a month later presumably because they couldn’t sell the vehicle.
My story is much longer than this and I have a huge amount of supporting evidence for which I am constructing a website which will go live by the end of this week, please see me on http://www.lonsdalevehiclesale.co.uk Please whatever you do, don’t buy from these people, they are not to be trusted and they are still holding the van and all of my money.