{craigslist adventure, episode 73}

Once there was a guy who loved Craigslist almost as much as life. I married that guy.

And once there was an auto broker who used Craigslist to sell cars. We almost bought a car from him.

About a month ago we sold our relatively gas efficient car on Craigslist. It was a fairly smooth process and thanks to high gas prices and a crummy economy we were able to get more out of it than we originally expected.

We spent the next several weeks scouring Craigslist for used cars.

I'm sorry, that was misleading.

Jordan spent the next several weeks scouring Craigslist for used cars, sending over 152 emails about potential cars. I spent the next several weeks reading emails from Jordan about the cars he found and going with him as he looked at them. It was exhausting. All that reading and riding along.

Last week our search led us to a QX4 and so Thursday night we drove down to the seller's house and checked it out. He owned the car for about 5 years and was selling it to get a truck. The guy was nice- not overbearing and just talkative enough that I really liked him (and kind of trusted him). We noticed the bag of soccer balls in the front seat and talked about his kid playing in a U-10 league. He coaches at a local Catholic school. When we returned from driving the car we talked to him about getting it checked out by our mechanic. He was completely ok with that and even offered up times that we could come and pick it up to take it there. He works from home so his schedule is pretty flexible. Naturally we asked What do you do?

I'm a broker.


A stock broker? 


No, an auto broker


Gotcha, mind if I take a picture of the VIN so I can run a Carfax? 


He was fine with that but when asked if the VIN on the inside of the car door matched the VIN on the dashboard he kind of squirmed. It wasn't an accusatory question- the VIN was hard to read and taking a picture in the dark was even harder. Truthfully his squirming was not too noticeable and it didn't even hit us until after this whole thing ended.


We got the VIN and left to talk the car over. As we were driving home Jordan casually brings up the fact that he may have seen other cars this guy has been selling on Craigslist.

Weird because the seller said he already sold his wife's car for a Pilot and is selling his for a Tacoma.

Flash forward to the next day as Jordan is texting with him times to get the car to our mechanic. After texting he searched craigslist for the seller's phone number, and realized he had sold not one other car, but 4! Then, Jordan receives the below series of texts from the guy

I guess we were the 5th in the pipeline. What exactly is he being extra careful of in order to handle correctly? And why is he having this conversation via text rather than face-to-face. "I miss you being who I fell in love with". Seriously???

Right now we are thankful for text message mishaps.