What is a “car wrap” scam?
You’ve all seen cars that are covered in adverts for various energy drinks or other products. This is called car wrapping, as you literally “wrap” the car in decals for the product. It seems like easy money, especially if you have a car or bike that would attract attention anyway. There are legitimate companies that offer people money to display their products this way, but of course there are also scammers who will use this as the basis of their scam.
This is how the scam works. The scammer will mass email people, using the name of a popular product that is known for paying people to wrap their cars. They agree to send you a check for payment, plus an amount they claim needs to be sent to the company that will provide the decals via a money transfer service. This is how the scam works. The company doesn’t exist. It’s really the scammer. The check will be fake or stolen. Scammers pay “mules” to ship the checks out from their country to make it appear more legitimate. The main warning flags with this one are the fact that they expect you to pay the company to place the ads on your car from the check they send you, money is paid up front rather than after a period of time from your beginning the program and that they ask you to send the money to the company via money transfer service.