Used-Car Scams Picking Up Speed Through State : Fraud: DMV investigators are overwhelmed by the swindlers. Many of those fleeced are immigrants.

SACRAMENTO —  Charles and Susan McBryde thought they had found the perfect buy in a used car.

The clean 1987 Honda Accord was for sale by a private party--a big, jolly man who said he had gotten the vehicle in a recent divorce settlement, but didn’t need it. The charcoal-gray sedan ran well, had a sunroof, electric windows and only 49,000 miles on the odometer.

The McBrydes bought it for $7,000.

That was June 4. Two weeks later, the car’s clutch went out. Repair cost: $456. A few weeks after that, the McBrydes learned from state Department of Motor Vehicles investigators that their Honda had already been driven more than 100,000 miles when they bought it--twice what the odometer read.

The McBrydes were caught in a used-car scam that is sweeping the state, DMV officials said. They said that growing numbers of Californians from all walks of life are being swindled by crooked automobile peddlers who pick up vehicles from a variety of sources and then pose as private parties selling their family cars.

DMV investigators said they are overwhelmed by the swindlers who, using variations of the scam, are breaking federal odometer tampering laws, state fraud statutes, stolen car trafficking laws, as well as regulations requiring licenses to sell cars for profit.

“The scope is tremendous,” said LaDonna Devenberg, senior special investigator for the DMV in San Diego. Although there are no hard and fast statewide numbers, “it is happening in every city in California faster than we can keep up with it.”

“It’s a constant battle,” agreed Vince Rojas, a DMV senior investigator in Los Angeles. “You’re not going to stop it. . . . It’s fairly easy money.”

California--where more than 4 million used cars changed hands last year--is a juicy market for auto scam artists posing as private parties, DMV investigators say.

The swindlers use various schemes, but generally exploit the common belief that it is more prudent to buy a used car from a private party than from a car dealer.

In some cases, high-mileage cars are bought at auction and their odometers are rolled back before they are resold. In others, wrecks are fixed up and palmed off as pampered one-owner cars. Sometimes the vehicles are stolen.

In many cases, licensed automobile dealers pose as private parties selling family cars in order to sell vehicles they obtained through auctions or trade-ins. Such back-door sales save the dealers taxes, and dupe the buyers into thinking they are dealing with a private party. Frequently, slickers simply buy cars through classified ads, spruce them up and, without re-registering them, jack up the prices and resell them, posing as original owners.

The DMV has only 230 investigators statewide to try to police private-party scams as well as other vehicle-related crimes.

Last year, DMV officials, acting on complaints and their own investigations, opened cases on 1,200 car peddlers suspected of doing business without a license.

But these cases represent only a fraction of private-party swindles and do not, for example, include instances in which licensed auto dealers were accused of duping used-car buyers by posing as private parties.

Used-car swindlers sometimes peddle automobiles at vehicle swap meets. Sometimes, they simply make curbside deals with buyers attracted by “For Sale” signs in car windows. Frequently, however, victims are fleeced via classified ads.

It was a classified ad in a Sacramento newspaper that attracted the McBrydes to a trio of alleged swindlers now accused of victimizing at least 36 other buyers in 1990-1991, taking in $238,505, according to DMV investigators.

The trio, Richard Alan Catalano, Karen Lynn Aderhold and Rob J. Sipe, were using Sipe’s state license to sell automobiles to buy high-mileage used cars at restricted dealers’ auctions, according to authorities. The odometers were rolled back, and Catalano and Aderhold placed ads and posed as private parties to sell the vehicles, investigators said. The three have been charged with grand theft, and Sipe has surrendered his dealer’s license.

The McBrydes are still paying the price of the alleged scam. Susan, a registered nurse, and Charles, a respiratory therapist, are paying $252 a month on the bank loan they obtained to buy the car. It is unlikely that the McBrydes could sell the vehicle for what they owe on it because of its high mileage. They worry that the car, which one of them drives to work every day, is about to break down again.

“I am angry,” said Susan McBryde, “because I let myself be taken like that, that I trusted the guy.”

Some people in the San Francisco Bay Area are angry about the used cars they bought there. In Hayward, Sergio Paz took the used-car scam a step further than the Sacramento trio, DMV investigators said.

Paz bought dozens of high-mileage wrecks at auctions, fixed them up, rolled back the odometers on some, and sold them as one-owner vehicles, officials said.

Investigators said Paz obliterated the word salvage that appears by law on the registration slips of these wrecked vehicles. Then, investigators said, Paz offered to handle the DMV paperwork for buyers so they wouldn’t learn that they had bought wrecked cars until the pink slips marked with the word salvage arrived in the mail.

Even then, DMV officials said, many victims of such scams don’t examine their pink slips and don’t realize they had bought wrecks until they try to sell the cars.

Paul Wallis, an insurance salesman from Belmont, gives Paz high marks for chutzpah if nothing else. Wallis was shopping for a used car for his daughter last year when he saw a classified ad for a 1984 Toyota Corolla with only 32,000 miles on it.

When Wallis answered the ad, he said, Paz told him the car belonged to his late grandfather, who had purchased it new. Wallis gave Paz $4,500 cash for the dusty-rose Toyota. Paz turned over a registration slip, promised to take care of all the DMV paperwork, and said the new pink slip would arrive by mail in about two weeks.

But after Wallis got home, he became suspicious when he saw signs of body work on the car and noted that the registration slip had been altered.

When confronted, Paz cheerfully took the car back, refunded $3,300 of Wallis’ money and promised to give him the other $1,200 the next day.

Wallis never got the money. And Paz, undaunted, allegedly resold the car to another victim.

“He forged my daughter’s name to the sale certificate,” Wallis said. “I called the new owner and he was appalled and didn’t believe me because he said the car looked so good.”

Paz was charged with 10 counts of grand theft, DMV investigators said, and pleaded guilty to one count. He is to be sentenced Nov. 27.

Paz may have had chutzpah , but first place for brazenness goes to a San Diego swindler, according to DMV investigator Devenberg.

The man lived in an apartment complex across the street from the DMV office. “He was so bold,” Devenberg said.

“I drove by one day and I thought, my God, that guy is selling that car. . . . I had seen that car when it was towed in there (to the complex) as a total junk. It was a red Honda that had been rolled.”

Devenberg said the suspect, Mohammed Jamasi, was buying wrecks, taking them across the border to Tijuana for repair, and then selling them to local college students.

Like Paz, Jamasi took care of the paperwork for his customers so they wouldn’t see the word salvage on documents, Devenberg said.

“He would tell these people that, ‘I live right across the street from the DMV, so I’ll get it registered for you,’ ” she said.

Jamasi has been charged with grand theft.

The Rev. Paul Owens, a Baptist minister in the San Diego area, fell victim to such a scam last summer when he saw a classified ad for a used station wagon, according to Devenberg.

The seller, Karim Benmarzouk, identified himself as a college recruiter who was helping financially strapped students by selling their cars for them, Owens said.

Owens paid $2,200 for a 1985 Oldsmobile station wagon whose odometer read 77,000 miles.

DMV officials allege that two weeks previously, Benmarzouk bought the car from a legitimate private party for $1,300 and rolled 50,000 miles off the odometer.

“I guess I was too hot to get a good deal,” said Owens, “and my eyes were closed to some things.”

DMV officials are seeking a federal complaint against Benmarzouk, alleging that he committed a felony in rolling back the odometer.

In the meantime, Benmarzouk’s wife, Elaine, opened a state-licensed used-car dealership called Kena Group in San Diego. Benmarzouk works there as a salesman and is also licensed by the state, according to DMV records.

Elaine Benmarzouk insists that her husband is innocent of odometer-tampering.

In Los Angeles, the automobile capital of the world, used-car swindlers are especially busy, investigators said. The area’s many immigrants, unfamiliar with car sale regulations, are frequently victimized.

Ayat Ibrahim, a native of Egypt, who lives in the San Fernando Valley, was desperate for transportation to get to her sales job last fall after her car was wrecked.

When Ibrahim saw a clean-looking, used Dodge parked on the street with a “For Sale” sign in the window, she phoned the owner, Bill Dela Vina. Ibrahim recalls that Dela Vina told her that the vehicle was a 1984 model, a good, reliable car that he was selling because his wife had had twins and the couple needed a van.

Ibrahim borrowed $2,400 to buy the vehicle but she was not able to register it with the DMV because Dela Vina had given her only a bill of sale, telling her that his father-in-law had the pink slip. When Ibrahim finally received the title from Dela Vina, she saw that the car was a year older than she had been told. Soon she was pouring hundreds of dollars into the vehicle in repair bills and still the car overheated and wouldn’t accelerate.

DMV investigators said Dela Vina had been using a connection with a licensed car dealer to get into restricted auctions in Sacramento. Investigators said Dela Vina bought cars at the auctions with down payments. He got the pink slips after he resold the vehicles and paid off the balances. It was only then that he was able to send titles to buyers like Ibrahim.

Far from being anyone’s family car, DMV officials said, Ibrahim’s Dodge previously belonged to a defunct car dealership that rented out vehicles.

“Sometimes,” Ibrahim said, “I cry in the car about the money I paid.”

Dela Vina was charged by the Los Angeles city attorney’s office this year with nine misdemeanor counts of selling vehicles without a license. In 1987, he had been warned by the DMV after a similar alleged infraction. The next year he was again caught illegally peddling cars and fined $235. On Aug. 12, Dela Vina pleaded guilty to three of the nine new counts and was placed on three years’ informal probation. He has to pay a fine of $2,796 to the court and $3,704 in restitution to Ibrahim by Dec. 12.

Sometimes the victims of used-car swindles lose both their money and the vehicle.

Filiberto Patino Zepeda, a laborer who migrated to Los Angeles from Mexico, was looking for a used vehicle when he spotted a black Toyota pickup with a “For Sale” sign parked outside a market in Pacoima last year.

Patino Zepeda speaks no English, but the owner of the vehicle, a man with long blond hair, was accompanied by an interpreter. A deal was struck. Patino Zepeda gave the blond man $2,500 in cash that he had earned at jobs paying $200 a week and, in return, was given the pickup and a pink slip.

When Patino Zepeda took the title to a DMV office to register the vehicle in his own name, officials found that the pink slip was a counterfeit and the pickup was stolen. Patino Zepeda lost his $2,500 and the vehicle.

“He had it (the pickup) about two days,” said an acquaintance of the victim. “He felt mad, disappointed. It took him about three years to save the money.”

Pending state legislation should make some of these scams more difficult. One bill, for example, requires that license plates be removed from cars sold at salvage auctions and state vehicle sales, making it harder for grifters to resell the vehicles without registering them.

But the scope of the problem is so great, most observers say, and the criminal justice system is already so overloaded, that the most effective defense against the used-car swindlers is simply, buyer beware.

Tips for the ‘Private Party’ Car Buyer

State Department of Motor Vehicle investigators say that alert buyers are the best defense against swindlers who pose as private parties selling cars. Here are some tips from DMV experts:

* Swindlers often put more than one car up for sale at a time, so when calling in response to an ad, don’t ask about a particular model. Instead, say, “Is the car still for sale?” Beware if the seller responds by saying, “Which car?”

* Beware of sellers who want to make sales on the street or in parking lots. Be sure of the seller’s true residence.

* Insist on seeing the seller’s identification.

* Don’t buy a car from a seller who doesn’t have the title, or pink slip, in his possession and own name. Scam artists commonly say they are selling cars for friends or relatives. Examine the title carefully for alterations or a notation that the car is a “salvage” vehicle.

* Ask when and where the car was purchased.

* Beware of sellers who are vague or evasive in answers to questions about the car.

* Insist on seeing maintenance and repair records. If the seller has none, ask where the vehicle was serviced.

* Swindlers frequently roll back odometers, so look for service station maintenance stickers on the inside of car doors and compare the mileage recorded there to the mileage on the odometer. If there are no maintenance stickers on the car, beware.