Complaint Review: Kuki Auto Consignor - Miami Florida

I recently spotted a Tiffin DP on Craigslist that looked like a very solid coach for a very low price. The pictures were poor so I emailed the seller last week to ask for more photos and with a list of questions.

The owner wrote back yesterday and asked for my direct email address so she could send photos. She was a doctor and used an adventhealth email address. She told me that the coach was now with a consigner called Kuki Auto (kukiauto.com). The site looked legit and a Google search revealed mostly older reviews but usually on more obscure sites. But there were a lot of them at different time periods going back to 2012. No BBB info. No Google reviews.

You agree to buy the RV, the seller confirms and you have 24-48 hours to do a wire transfer. They then deliver the RV up to 1000 miles free. Mileage charges are added above that. They inspect the RV at their facility but once they deliver, you have a 7 day guarantee. So I knew I could get an indy inspection done. If you return it, the seller has to pay. The price, $11k, was very low and I knew I'd need to act fast so I agreed to buy it.

It appeared to me that this was a Doctor that didn't know how to market it herself. She claimed they'd already bought another RV and just wanted to move it.

This morning, she emailed saying she'd heard from the company and wanted to make sure I was ready to proceed. The company sent me an invoice and instructions on where to wire the money. I was then to email a copy of the wire transfer to receipt to their office.

I also tried calling the company and got one of those voice mails that uses a recorded announcement that runs you around in circles and never connected with a live person. They also had a live chat feature and there I got a response.

On the bill of sale, the company name was different and the company receiving the wire transfer was yet another company with an account with Citibank. The company was based in Miami. At this point, I contacted Citibank. They wouldn't reveal anything since I wasn't the account holder.

I called the BBB. They had no info on any of the companies.

Then I Googled the addresses of the alleged lot locations listed on the website in cities around the US. Every address was just multi business office buildings. Nothing that resembled a consignment lot.

Then I used the Internet archives aka the Wayback machine to look at the history of the website. Up until around 2016, this was an active site for a consignment site. Then I saw that, for a while, the domain was for sale. Then the new website appeared in the past year. The scammer bought the domain and put up the new site. The site is hosted in the Netherlands.

Finally, I googled the Doctor. The name came up for two different doctors but neither was in Atlanta. I noticed the site she emailed from was adventhealth.doctor. When you enter that site in a browser, it points to adventhealth's main website. They have no doctor by that name.

Then I googled the registration of the site using a WhoIs search. It's not adventhealth's site. The scammer just has it redirected to their site and uses the email address to appear legit. I let adventhealth know to go after the registrar and get that site taken down. I'm not sure who else to contact in law enforcement or if they'll actively pursue this. Someone like this might be overseas and could easily do this again.

I posted this story on mutliple RV facebook groups and heard from several others that were approached. They seem to focus on older RVs from quality manufactuers like Tiffin, Newmar, Monaco, etc. Others told me they'd seen this same scam with the Doctor going back as far as two years. I was shocked to see there were no negative reviews at all.