How to avoid being scammed when shipping your car

If you happen to be reading this blog article, then chances are you've been doing some research about auto shipping and you are spooked out by the scammish nature of the companies your coming across online, and your finding it hard to trust much of anything you see online, including quotes.

So the question is, what can you trust , and how do you navigate this perilous expedition of locating a reputable company to move your car, without being duped, scammed or BSd out of hundreds of dollars, or even worse having your vehicle damaged while in transport ?

What you first have to understand in order to be able to make any type of informed decision in relation to shipping your car, is how the process ACTUALLY works. That will help you separate fact from fiction. You can find a great deal of material and information on YT on our channel Auto Transport For Dummies". We cover just about every scam and lie the industry has came up with to date.

THE TOP THINGS YOU NEED TO BE AWARE OF WHEN SHIPPING YOUR CAR !!!

1.) You must be aware of the fact that it is a true impossibility for anyone, or any company to give you a 100% guaranteed rate on the front end of your transport. We realize this is not what you want to hear, and so do these nefarious auto transport companies. They prey on one's desire for guarantees and for low prices. Those two ingredients are all they typically need to get a good number of potential clients to book orders with them. Often customers will go for that first low quote they see, and do little to no research on the company, their Yelp / Google reviews, and , or , how the process of shipping a car actually works. But what inevitably happens in probably better then 70% of cases , is that once a company has some type of agreement or order with you, even if you put "$0.00" down, they will not hesitate to charge your card the deposit that goes to them, and then after the fact tell you the transport is going to actually take a higher number then guaranteed, and the dates you requested are just no longer going to work. So how does one avoid falling into these traps ? The answer is really quite simple. You MUST do your homework and read reviews, and check for vagueness in a company's reviews. A lot of company's are pumping fake reviews all over the place online. Secondly check the company's yelp and google page, as those review pages often are not nearly as glowing as the reviews they might be promoting on their website or on pay-for-play sites like transport reviews.com . Thirdly, check their process for these common Red Flags:

Common Red Flags to look out for when choosing an auto transport company

• Guaranteeing Rates on the front end of your transport. (Rates can be estimated to within $100-150 in most cases but it's impossible to say 100% on the front end or give an exact figure. )


• Guaranteeing times or dates. (Transports work within 2-3 day windows of time , not specific times - it's impossible for a company to promise this even if they wanted to. )
• Requiring full up front payment for the full cost of the transport.


• Price Locking quotes or exact numbers. ( Sherpa Auto Transport does this with some success only because they tend to overquote every transport by anywhere from $300-500 - so your paying a hefty price for an artificial price lock that is not even guaranteed ).


• Aggressive tactics like cold calling customers from lead lists and offering to have your vehicle loaded within hours or minutes, or promising all kinds of gimmicks. ( Dynamic Auto Movers is probably one of the most well known for incredibly aggressive phone and sales tactics. )


• Telling customers things like "We need a deposit now to hold the spot ". This is one of the many lies transport companies will throw at their client on the front end. When a quote first comes in, these companies have not even had time to upload these orders to central dispatch or any other transport load board. So these claims are 90% false. It's yet another pressure gimmick to get one to book an order with them.


• The broker company will act as if they are the trucking company and they are in command of their own trucks. ( Instead of being honest and explaining the process of shipping a car, a typical tactic is to dupe the customer by claiming to have their own trucks, so that the customer will book the order. )


• Not disclosing the fees that they charge. ( Most transport companies try to obscure the reality of what's going on when shipping a car. Every broker is out to make a huge cut on every order, and that will inevitably lead to reduced carrier quality on every load. This is why airRyd discloses our fees that we charge on every single order - which you can view here. )


• Not disclosing or explaining that the quote is indeed a "close approximation" and not a hard final number. ( The rate cannot be locked in on the front end until a carrier is officially assigned to the order, at that point the rate will become final. This is something that is rarely explained to customers. )


• No Yelp Page or a Yelp page with poor reviews and ratings. ( Although we ourself are a victim of Yelp's aggressive algorithms of filtering out a huge % of our legitimate reviews , we continue to believe it remains one of the best metrics to actually check the reliability of some of these transport companies. )
  
  Many companies will prominently display a 4.9 or 5.0 on their website or on transport reviews, but then on Yelp they will have a 2.0 or worse. Yelp does a great job of filtering fake reviews - and this industry is one of the worst when it comes to fake reviews. Google reviews are a somewhat distant 2nd, but still far superior to what's left after Yelp. Many have asked us about BBB, but from what we have seen BBB is not a reliable review site any longer , at least not for this particular industry. They simply charge a monthly fee and are mostly hands off after that, and their review algorithms essentially allow any and all reviews to stick.


• No Bond information or company location within the USA is displayed on their website. ( Many pop up sites are not even operating within the United States ).


• Little to no real information about the shipping process is found on their website. ( Montway for instance has a process that states: 1.) Get a quote. 2.) We Pickup your car. 3.) Receive your car. ) If only the process was this simple !!!!! Many companies if not the majority simply rely on consumer ignorance to keep their business going. Keeping customers in the dark is the name of the game.